


Three-Hundred Straight North

by llethe



Series: Twenty-Six and Legend [5]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Anxiety Attacks, Canonical major character deaths, Drama, Gen, Insinuation of child abuse, Junk science, Language, Minor Character Deaths, Minor original chararacters, Nightmares, Riverside, Single POV, Starfleet politics, Tarsus IV, descriptions of violence, post-STID, sap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-10
Updated: 2013-11-10
Packaged: 2018-01-01 00:46:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1038344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/llethe/pseuds/llethe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Riverside is small: small for Iowa, tiny for Earth, and infinitesimal against the universe.  Everything there comes with reminders, emotions, regrets: history.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three-Hundred Straight North

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don’t own Star Trek or “A Tale of Two Cities.” 
> 
> Warnings/Etc: PG-13. Gen. Language. Post-STID. Single POV. Angst/drama. (Allll the angst.) Canonical major character deaths. Minor character deaths. Minor original characters. Tarsus IV. Insinuation of child abuse. Descriptions of violence. Descriptions of anxiety attacks. Sap. Riverside. Starfleet politics. Junk science.  
> Characters: Kirk, Pike, Bones, Spock, Carol, a little Scotty, a little Chekov  
> Word Count: ~20,000
> 
> Timeline: With the exception of the two Prelude scenes, this story takes place after “Last Month’s Yesterday.” It’s also largely a direct continuation of/sequel to “Twenty-Six and Legend.” 
> 
> Note: This work assumes that the deleted Kirk Prime scene from STXI is canon (http://trekmovie.com/2009/11/23/read-the-star-trek-2009-scene-written-for-william-shatner/).

 

 

 

Prelude

Jim’s body burns from the inside out, like scalding, unrelenting water, pain and agony and every word alike.  What doesn’t burn, tingles; what doesn’t tingle is numb.  He’d been thrown to the floor hard, too hard, and the ironic part about all this is that maybe it’s a good thing he’s dead.  
   
He doesn’t know what gives him the strength to crawl back to Engineering, on elbow and knee joints that don’t have the strength to stay locked, relying on irradiated muscles that are dead, dead, dead, to pull him through the Jeffries tube, one lava-tinged gasp at a time.  
   
Maybe he doesn’t want some poor crewman—or, worse, a friend—to have to crawl in here after him. Maybe he has a point to prove.  Maybe he just doesn’t want to die alone.  
   
He’s somehow sinking into the corner of the containment chamber, Scotty at eye-level beyond the glass.  There are things he wants to say—“I’m sorry,” being the first—but he doesn’t have the breath.  The clock is ticking down to the end of his life, and he can’t _talk_ , he can’t _touch_ , he can’t…  
   
Jim closes his eyes and breathes, naively trying to level out a body that is shutting down, one system at a time.  He, of all people, should know how death works.  All he knows is that it’s never worked the way he’s wanted it to.  
   
“Mr. Spock.  Sir, you’d better get down here.  Better hurry.”  
   
Jim doesn’t want to die, but if he has to—and he does; there’s no coming back from this—then he’s glad it will be with Spock at his side, because Bones is right: Spock will let Jim die.  When there’s no way back, the best gift is someone who can stand resolute with you.  
   
Jim forces words through a raw throat, scrapes oxygen from lungs that feel like red-hot, rusted-orange grills on an old-style barbeque, presses his hand against glass and doesn’t know how much strength he has left to keep it there, but he tries—oh, god, he _tries_ —to make right the last year, the last week, the last day, the last minutes and seconds, and, most importantly, the years that will never be.  
   
And Spock…  Spock cries.  Spock says he doesn’t know how to _not_ feel.  If Jim had more time, he’d think about that.  There’s more to say, more to fix, but he’s grasping at anything and finding nothing, and he _knows_.  
   
This is Dad.  This is Sam.  This is Mom.  This is Vulcan.  This i—  
   
Jim dies, thinking of anyone but himself.  That’s a hard lesson.

 

 

* * *

 

Tarsus ended three nights after Jack died, with Jim wedging himself between two steel-gray boulders and passing out under the frigid night sky, his own death an absolute.  If the infection behind the fever, chills, and coughing didn’t take him, then Kodos would.  Either way, he’d thought: end game.  
   
Instead, he woke in a dimly-lit room, buried in medical lines and tubes, both wrists leashed to bed rails with soft restraints.  He panicked, but only until his vision cleared enough for him to see Winona sprawled out, asleep, in a chair in the corner.    
   
Tarsus was over, just like that: the difference between closing his eyes and opening them again.    
Jim waited for some sort of emotion to creep over him—some overpowering sense of _alive, safe, it’s over, I made it._ Instead, he was tired, thirsty, his throat was sore, and he was tied to a god damn bed.  
   
“Hey,” he tried to say, but his voice was a whisper of a scratch.    
   
Winona kept sleeping, mouth wide open.  Most days, which weren’t often to start with, Jim didn’t have the energy to put up with her.  Today, Jim had less than that.  He could barely keep his eyes open, and, so, he didn’t.  
   
He would later learn that seven and a half weeks of his life had disappeared to respiratory failure, cardiac tamponade (whatever that was), meningitis (oh, fun), hypophosphatemia (exactly what it sounded like), and a slew of other complications that knew exactly how to say “fuck you” to modern medicine.  He would learn that he hadn’t come _close_ to death: he’d met it five times.  
   
He would learn that nearly ninety percent of Tarsus IV’s population had either been slaughtered, killed, committed suicide, or died of “natural” causes secondary to starvation and malnutrition.  He would learn that people like him were considered “lucky,” despite everything he’d seen and everything he’d done to survive.  
   
He would learn that after so much shit piled up—so many sleepless nights and nightmares, so many pitiful looks, so many too-sudden noises and movements—that there was absolutely no way to live it all down.  There was no part of him left that could even hope to, or so he’d thought for so many worthless, flat-lined years.  
   
Thirteen years later, not a whole lot is different.  He’s lost almost three weeks of his life to stasis and coma, the latter of which Bones explains away with a huff, eye roll, and loose wave of his hand.  Jim hasn’t just met death; they’re basically roommates.  He’s still considered lucky, despite losing a quarter of his crew and a chunk of San Francisco.  
   
The only difference is that he wakes to two devoted friends, and when he closes his eyes so quickly after waking, he does so mostly against his will, not because he doesn’t have better things to do.    
   
The problem, he quickly discovers, is that the sleepless nights and nightmares have returned, in full force; the pitiful looks are back; and every too-close vocal tone, word choice, or sensation lead to panic and cold anxiety, as though he’s a stranger in his own mind.  
   
Maybe it’s Harrison; maybe it’s Marcus; maybe it’s Qo’noS; maybe it’s _Enterprise_ ; maybe it’s the warp core searing him through; maybe it’s death; maybe it’s San Francisco; maybe it’s everyone he’s let down; maybe it’s everything, from _Kelvin_ on, and maybe it’s all finally, _finally_ too much.

 

 

  
1

If Jim takes anything at all away from his conversation with Carol, it’s that it’s _not_ all finally, finally too much.  Their conversation actually settles better than anything else has, at least since the morning before Daystrom.   
   
It will never be enough to sit back and _hope_ that things will work out for the best, no matter how many times Bones tells him to “relax” and that “everything will be fine.”  That thought is more empowering than it should be.   
   
With Bones asleep on the couch, Jim retreats to his bedroom, where the windows haven’t yet been tinted.  They’re clear into the starless night, and the missing parts of the San Francisco skyline are much more palpable now than they were during the day.  
   
Though tempted, Jim doesn’t tint the windows.  Instead, he pulls up a chair and slouches into it, gaze focused out the window into a world that Carol told him isn’t new at all.   
   
Although the strike zone is well beyond Jim’s building, the plumb height of Jim’s apartment coupled with the crews’ floodlights make the ground easy to see.  Even at this hour, recovery and clean-up crews are still working: sifting for bodies, clearing wreckage, trying like everyone else to make sense of it.   
   
Jim’s tried to do that.  It’s not easy.  
   
Logic tells him that San Francisco is the price paid to stop Marcus and that, without using Harrison to do that, Marcus would have succeeded:  destroyed _Enterprise_ , vilified the crew, and made his delusions come true.  It still sounds like an easy excuse, and it doesn’t make the waste of life any easier to accept.  
   
“Try to make it count, Son,” Pike had said, seconds after the first time in eight years that Jim had stepped foot in San Francisco.  From anyone else, it would have sounded like a taunt.  From Pike, it sounded like the god-honest truth.  
   
There may not be a way to make what happened to San Francisco, or to a quarter—a _quarter—_ of the _Enterprise_ crew, count.  He’s ready to try.  
   
Jim powers on his PADD and pulls up the database on Mianda Zero.  He has no idea what Mianda Zero is, except, obviously, a planet in the Mianda system that Carol thought important enough to mention.   
   
Starfleet says Mianda is a tiny, uninhabited system, clear outside Federation space, with a Class H planet, a Class D planetoid, an asteroid belt, and a bunch of little moons.  It’s been a no-go system since forever: its sun is a raging alpha-emitter on the cusp of supernova, i.e., rare, deadly, and growing ever-deadlier.   
   
Jim lowers his PADD and shakes his head, ready to write the whole thing off as Carol having a bad night.   
   
A whisper of an instinct tells him that’s wrong.  
   
“Computer, full access uplink with my PADD, authorization JX9909DP.”  
   
The computer chirps compliance, and his PADD becomes a window into Starfleet’s complete database, just like if he was on _Enterprise_.  It still won’t be good enough to access Starfleet’s top-level classified information.  There’s a subroutine for that, one he wrote years ago and probably shouldn’t work anymore.  
   
Jim doesn’t hesitate to trigger the subroutine.  His PADD’s screen goes black, like it’s supposed to, and when it comes back up, he’s running invisible and with full access to Starfleet’s top-tier, classified database.   
   
“Never change Starfleet,” Jim mutters.  
   
The reports and digital documents contained therein about the Mianda system are the proverbial rabbit hole, and Jim falls straight down into another story of well-hidden Federation catastrophe.   
   
Six years after _Kelvin_ , a Starfleet experiment turned Mianda’s sun into an alpha-emitter: what then-Captain Alexander Marcus described as an experiment gone “tragically” wrong but in “many of the right ways.”  Within a week, Mianda Zero, the system’s thriving M class and home to underdeveloped society of an approximated eight-hundred thousand, became an irradiated Class H, i.e., largely uninhabitable by any standard.  Mianda One, the system’s planetoid with an sub-surface ocean full of life, quickly followed suit.  
   
Afterward, the project that killed an entire planetary system was classified to the highest levels of Command and referred to Section 31 for further research and development, “in anticipation of inevitable war.”   
   
It’s Carol’s proof that twenty thousand people needed to die, to prove to Starfleet that their fear and incompetence turned _Kelvin_ into a kill box aimed at themselves.  
   
Jim hates being wrong, but especially tonight.  Especially about this.  
   
 _“Any other surprises you know about?”_ Jim sends to Carol’s PADD.   
   
His own PADD says that it’s already 0713, but he doesn’t believe it.  He’s been up all night and isn’t the least bit tired: he’s infuriated, frustrated, disgusted, and wound up so tight he might explode.  
   
He doesn’t expect a response until sometime in the afternoon, the earliest any reasonable person would be awake after drinking as much as Carol had.   
   
Carol, apparently, isn’t reasonable.  
   
 _“I assume you already know that Tarsus IV wasn’t wholly accidental.”_  
   
Son of a damned bitch.  
   
She’d read his file.  Not his file, but his _file_.  
   
Jim comes close to trying to find his communicator—wherever the hell that ended up—but it’s a good thing he doesn’t.  He could yell right about now.  
   
Also: yeah, he _does_ know that.   
   
 _“Let’s assume_. _”_  
   
 _“Beta Eryx.”_  
   
Jim goes dizzy for a second.  He knows that system.   
   
Beta Eryx is a gigantic, wide-binary system on the edge of Federation space.  Like Mianda, it’s a no-go, but with a radius of 100-lightyears.  The gravitational forces in that system are unpredictable, so much so that the fluctuations have destroyed two starships.  Starfleet’s database entry, which Jim has accessed before, out of morbid curiosity, basically reads, “Wow, that’s weird.”  
   
Carol’s suggesting that…  
   
He doesn’t know what to write back.  “I feel sick” might be too honest.  “I don’t think I want to know anymore” is definitely too honest.  “I suddenly understand why you’re hiding from everyone, Dr. Weapons Specialist” is flat-out cruel.   
   
Right.  
   
An accidental glance out the window spares him from having to decide.  The crews are loading what can only be three body bags, with what can only be month-old corpses inside, onto a shuttle.  What he sees are piles of limp, oddly-angled limbs, mottled, dirty skin, and sightless eyes, and what he knows is that there is nowhere safe or good.  
   
Before Jim knows he’s made the decision, he’s on his feet and out his bedroom door, PADD dropping with a hollow thud.  He slides down the wall in the hallway, head cribbed on his crossed forearms, and he breathes carefully against an oscillating tide of hot nausea.  
   
San Francisco has been home for the best years of Jim’s life.  Today, it’s the tiniest little box with walls that shrink ever smaller.  It can’t be what Jim needs it to be.  
   
The decision is easy: he can’t stay in this burnt-out husk of a city.  Running and hiding is easy, and he’s opposed to neither.  There’s only one other place in the universe he knows, besides _Enterprise_ , and that one other place is just about the dead last place he ever thought he’d voluntarily go back to.   
   
It’s where everything starts. 

 

 

* * *

Jim boards the slowest shuttle flight to Riverside he can find: a five-hour slog of stops and layovers between Starfleet shipyards and depots up and down the West Coast and across the Plains to the Midwest.    
   
The regular route takes an hour, tops.  The problem with that route is that Jim dreads the arrival.   
   
He spends the extra time fixated on drafting the outline to his personal supplement to the 3R report—on explaining why neither his starship nor anyone else’s should be anything like _Vengeance_ , and why Starfleet has to be better than what it is now and has been for twenty-six years.   
   
Tarsus, Mianda, Beta Eryx, and _Vengeance_ are four good reasons, all of which together could cost him _Enterprise_.  Like that’s ever stopped him before.  
   
Beta Eryx is still a mystery, one he can’t solve without access to a computer.  Unfortunately, he lost his, when he left San Francisco.  
   
Good thing he has a source.  
   
 _“I don’t have a computer.  I need to know about Beta Eryx.”_  
   
In under a minute, Carol forwards a packet full of information on Beta Eryx _and_ Mianda, like she’d just been waiting for him to ask.  
   
 _“Jim—Tarsus IV is the better way to go.  Use what you know.”_  
   
Jim stops, palms clammy, and thinks hard about her advice.  She’s right, mostly.  She’s been right, every time.   
   
 _“I don’t know that I can do that_ ,” Jim taps out, slowly, a simple statement so hard to admit.  He sends it.  
   
After several, very long moments, his PADD buzzes: _“That’s too bad, because you have a chance to make a difference.”_  
   
Jim closes his eyes, head back against the seat.   
   
Tarsus is a lot of things that never made it into _anyone’s_ official report.  It’s a lot of things he never told anyone: it’s neon blue shoes that made it impossible to hide, a broken phaser, and finding out what it’s like to kill to live.  It’s indescribable, the way it irrevocably changed his life, even as he crumpled it all into the tightest, smallest ball he could and threw it somewhere he wouldn't soon look.   
   
Carol’s telling him to go find it.  Uncrumple it.  And write a report fortified by it.

“Try to make it count, Son,” Pike had said to Jim, years ago and seconds after petrifying fear slammed into him.

“Don’t make you look bad.  Got it,” Jim said, all calm and all cool.  Appearances were important: make it look easy, never let onto any weakness.

Tarsus is a weakness.  It’s _the_ weakness.  To talk about it goes against everything that he is, but he’d be lying if he said _Vengeance_ hasn’t already dredged up long-buried memories of it.

 _“Maybe,”_ Jim writes back, intentionally vague.  Maybe.

For now, Jim decides to save Carol’s information on Beta Eryx for definitely later, most likely for when he starts to doubt himself.  
   
On his PADD, he submits a stay request to Starfleet Command, essentially asking them to forgo any decision on the approval of _Enterprise’s_ refits and repairs until he submits his personal report.  It’s not an uncommon request, and he expects it to be approved without trouble.  
   
He then switches to the never-used word processor and considers the blank, gray square.   
   
Reports are so much easier when dictated to a computer, but on a shuttle full of fully-uniformed Starfleet personnel, and, later, when he’ll be in a town full of bored locals and more fully-uniformed Starfleet personnel, it’s not an option.   
   
He easily loses himself in strings of sentences, words, contentions, and arguments.  Some of his words aren’t his at all, like: “the Federation is a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada; it’s important”; they’re better, and he uses them.  
   
He writes and researches for hours, pulling in research and conclusions published in reports and dissertations about Federation policy and regulation, all written by all those better and before him.  Archer’s landmark treatise on the Prime Directive.  Pike’s dissertation on _Kelvin_.  Decker’s exposition on the sanctity of intelligent life. In the back of his mind, he thinks it’s a joke that he’s suddenly taking their words seriously.  
   
Pages upon pages down, Jim blinks and looks up.  A sharp, drowning-like pain pounds through the left side of his head, and his eyes are cold and heavy.  The murmur of voices and faint buzzes and beeps of other PADDs are suddenly too-loud and obtrusive.  Even the soft grind of the shuttle’s engines and brief overhead announcements are grating.   
   
This is nothing new for him: churning out an extensive, sound report with just days to do it.  He’d written his dissertation—absolutely required to be a captain of anything in the Federation—in the middle of a slew of rapid-fire senior command classes and visiting with Pike every day.  
   
It’s nothing new, and he expected it to wring the hell out of him: he’s just as exhausted now as he was then, only with far less to look forward to.  Jim sets his PADD in his lap, rubs his eyes, and leans his head against the bulkhead.  He doesn’t intend and certainly doesn’t expect to sleep, let alone so easily, but he does.  
   
He dreams of hazy blurs of an older class of starship with narrow, square corridors and matte, dark gray walls. The blurs are interrupted by snaps of black, like an ancient slideshow, and the overwhelming pull of _sleep sleep sleep_.  
   
 _You should have let me sleep_.  
   
He dreams of voices and words he knows but doesn’t understand— _critical won’t make it don’t have capabilities losing him_ _the sun rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and emotions he can’t hear you it is a far, far better thing that i do someone should be here with_ —the words swallowed by a fog that he can neither explain nor escape.  
   
He dreams of drowning in cold blackness, pulled further and further and further under, not a breath left in his body.  He dreams of peacefulness.  
   
Jim wakes calm and collected, just as the shuttle docks in Riverside, the dream becoming little more than too-quiet, transient whispers.  
 

* * *

  
   
Dead Lou’s field is the first place Jim goes to.  
   
It’s clear across on the other side of Riverside—which is, like, nine whole miles—but by the time he gets there, there is only about an hour and a half of daylight left.  It should be plenty of time to...  
   
Well.  Jim’s not sure what the point is.  He came to Riverside to get away from San Francisco, not explore his so-called troubled youth, but here he is anyway.  
   
Back in the day, Dead Lou let his five-acre field go to mile-high weeds—a magical place if there ever was one to a whatever-year-old that could find solace just about anywhere but home—but mostly reams of dandelions, foxtails, not-horsetails, green and white clover, and those purple whatevers with white ends that taste like sugar.    
   
Scattered throughout the weeds used to be Dead Lou’s burn piles full of old junk and, on the edges of the fencerow, plumes of marijuana.  Beyond the field, there was the tree-line and Lou’s mini-junkyard of old, rusted farm machinery, full of rotted-black walnut shells.  
   
It was Jim’s favorite place growing up, the whole thing.  So what if he got covered in burrs and had to pull ticks out of his hair and from behind his ears.  That didn’t matter.    
   
After Tarsus, even after months of what Starfleet called “successful recovery,” nothing mattered. He came back to Dead Lou’s field, walked an aimless path, sunk down, and stared blankly at the summer-blue sky.  It gets a little weird here, the way he let bugs crawl skin-tickling over him undisturbed, and the way that, if he breathed just right, he could smell dead, decaying flesh.    
   
He was three months past fourteen, and he could be one of thousands in a mass grave, all limp, oddly-angled limbs, mottled, dirty skin, and sightless eyes.  Sights that never left him.  Guilt that never abated.  Tears that he never felt, until thirteen years and six words later, and he finally— _finally_ —thought it okay to let go and let someone say “it’s going to be okay, Son” and _mean_ it.  
   
 _I wish I’d listened to you more._  
   
 _I wish I’d appreciated you more._  
   
 _I wish I’d known you better._  
   
 _I wish I’d known you longer._  
   
Jim closes his eyes against that too-familiar mantra of wishes.   
   
Being back here—in Riverside, near this field, even in just the _hour_ he’s been in town—makes his life feel unreal, makes the crew seem like fictional characters.  Maybe he’s still eight or just-past-thirteen, spending his days trespassing in a daydream.    
   
He knows that’s not true, though, if only because of how much Riverside has changed in four years—a lifetime.  Jim’s been gone for what seems like longer.    
   
Dead Lou is actually dead.  The field of weeds and burn piles is all yellow-green soybeans, ripe for harvest.  The junky, rusted machinery and its treasure-trove of old, hollow walnut shells are gone.  The line of trees that trails the winding creek is a mix of crinkling yellows, burgundy reds, and oranges, and their musky smell mixes with the unmistakable scent of marijuana.   
   
It looks good, better than it ever has, and Jim doesn’t mourn the changes.

* * *

  
   
The nap in the shuttle is the last good sleep Jim gets.   
   
He lies in a standard-issue Starfleet bed, in a standard-issue Starfleet room that doesn’t smell bad but smells enough like _something_ to be distracting, wide awake and dead tired.   
   
His mind is full-throttle, maximum warp, _go, go, go_.  
   
When he closes his eyes, he hears the crunch and snap of Marcus’s skull.  He feels the vibrations and shudders of _Enterprise_ being run down and torn apart.  He sees the glint of a Klingon bat’leth, hears its metallic whistle as it slices through air, just a fraction of a breath from his face.  He sees the sharp points of Harrison’s teeth (man, Carol had been right about that): the smell of his breath, the sound of his voice, the cold grip of his fingers.  
   
He sees a debris field of wreckage, all from _Enterprise,_ including bodies of crewmen vented into raw space.  He sees San Francisco, entire skyscrapers cut in half and collapsed into burning pits of chalky, choking gray ash and steel—most bodies vaporized in an instant, others half-decomposed under piles of twisted wreckage.  
   
Eyes open, he can’t stop thinking of all the things he could have, should have done differently.  Adrenaline comes easy, especially with the ship dying and the crew one step behind, Jim lost and frozen on the bridge— _what do I do, what do I do, this can’t be real, this is insane._   If he’d stretched his hand out further, tried harder, maybe he could have saved a life or two, instead of surviving while his crew _crunched_ and _thudded_ against _Enterprise’s_ bulkheads.  
   
He sweats.  He burns hot and shivers cold, back and forth, again and again.  He kicks the sheets into bunches at the bottom of the bed, and then gets up to smooth them back down – again, and again, and again.  
   
He tries to calmly count numbers—in every language he knows—but there’s no controlling all the directions his brain wants to run.  He thinks of going outside and maybe going for a run—but no, absolutely not, not with the blood that Bones had no—  
   
 _Stop._  
   
He thinks of alcohol, any and every kind of it, and wonders if it would help or, more likely, make it all _just_ enough worse.  A bar fight would be great—but he can’t just go do that sort of stuff anymore.  
   
Instead, Jim lies in bed, wide awake and dead tired, through hours that stretch and drag.  It feels like the aftermath of Tarsus, all over again.   
   
It’s becoming less crumpled, whether he wants it to or not.  
 

* * *

  
   
In the morning, before sunrise, Jim throws on a gray University of Iowa sweater, hood up, and hits the quiet, moonlit streets of downtown Riverside: a split of old, resurfaced red-orange brick buildings and more modern ones, added when Riverside became too small for the Federation.   
   
Riverside is _still_ too small.  
   
On the outset, Jim has a visceral feeling that can only be described as “claustrophobic hate.”  Everything about this town is wrong, even though Jim knows, intellectually, that there’s nothing at all wrong, different, or outstanding about it.  Right now, Spock would call Jim “illogical”—and rightly so.  
   
Only, there’s no ocean or bay: no saltwater breeze and embarrassing, lazy afternoons on the beach trying and failing to learn how to surf.  There’s no sprawl of buildings and diversity: nowhere to get lost in plain sight and definitely nothing endlessly new to discover.  There’s no commonality: no one to sit in a restaurant with to argue about warp-phase wave function quasi-collapse, and no one with whom to discuss the philosophical intricacies of Starfleet’s observe and explore vs. interfere mandates.  
   
There’s none of that.  
   
There’s Ralph’s synthesizer chip and exotic imported foods store.  The lot behind Ralph’s is still empty, only now with faded, fake flowers where Ms. Anderson used to hock used hypos (no matter how many times Starfleet tried to run her off).  
   
There’s the single farm equipment and supply store this side of New Iowa City, with the glob of grain silos still right next to it.   
   
There’s a vacant, new park with playground equipment and weather-proof, solarized educational game terminals (that Jim guarantees the kids don’t touch).  A block down from that, three bars and a liquor store: the definition of small-town Iowa.  
   
There’s the owner of a tiny little restaurant, who waves at Jim and to whom Jim waves back – someone he doesn’t recognize and who doesn’t recognize him.  Every business that went into that spot closed within six months: the antique store, the real book store, the other synthesizer-chip store, even a travel agency.  
   
That’s all there is, besides the cemeteries and school.  Jim plans to visit neither.  He doesn’t even know why he came this far into town –  
   
His ever-present PADD buzzes, the first time since his conversation with Carol yesterday morning.  Jim pulls it out of his sweater pocket and couldn’t be less surprised to see who it is.  
   
He sits down on a bench near the playground, errant pinecones and dead, autumn leaves at his feet, and reads the full message from Bones.  Honestly, Jim can’t believe it took Bones an _entire day_ to start in.  
   
 _“I tried to comm you, but you conveniently left your communicator between the couch cushions.  I’m going to give you the benefit of a doubt and assume you’re just really late getting home.  You’d better be coming home, Jim.”_  
   
There are no excuses that will appease Bones.  Jim’s done what he’s done and, if nothing else, he’s going to own it.  
   
 _“It’s going to be a few days_ , _”_ Jim replies.   
   
Well, actually, it’s going to be more than that.  Maybe after finishing with Riverside and pissing Starfleet off to the point of excommunication, he’ll go somewhere new.  Ridiculously, Earth is a planet he’s never tried to explore.   
   
 _“You get your ass home, right now.  You should still be hospitalized.”_  
   
“Nope, nope, nope,” Jim says to himself.   
   
 _“You’ve done more than enough.  I’m doing the rest,”_ Jim sends and then immediately adds Bones to his block list.   
   
He ignores a sudden, sick sensation of guilt: Bones is too damn good of a friend to have done something like this to, but...  Jim’s already here.  There’s no sense in going back, no matter how much he hates this place.  
   
Jim’s about to put his PADD away, when it buzzes again.  Bemused, he looks at the screen and finds an urgent information packet from Command.  
   
His stomach drops.  
   
It’s a confidential, nondisclosure directive, attached to Command’s report on _Enterprise’s_ role in the _Vengeance_ catastrophe.  A quick but less than surprising decision: Command had made up its collective mind long before he’d even woken up.  
   
Jim skims the report.  The tone of it screams, “You owe us for this.  Take the ship we give you and shut up.”  He reads the lies that fix his iffier command decisions and the truths that condemn Marcus’ actions but not so much his advancements.  He also reads the lies that protect Bones against recourse for the decision to restore Jim’s life: something that, now, never officially happened.   
   
Just like, officially, the Mianda system’s sun was always an alpha-emitter, and the Miandan people never existed.  Just like, officially, Tarsus IV’s crops were destroyed by a naturally-occurring fungus, instead of a Federation-sanctioned, would-be-beneficial biological fortification agent (you know, for when some vague war happened).  
   
He’s supposed to sign off on the new, polished version of what happened with _Vengeance_.  He’s supposed to become part of the problem, as if he hasn’t always been that.  As if Pike hadn’t rewritten and concealed years of history, just to get him into the Academy.  
   
His PADD buzzes _again._   With a frustrated huff, he looks at the notification and sees it’s a new message from Carol.  She’d gotten the same report and directive.   
   
 _“I trust that you see the distinction between making your difference and becoming a distraction.  If you fight Starfleet’s report, you’ll only be making an excuse for people to not see my father for what he was.”_  
   
Jim reads it four times, word for word, a litany of emotions pulling him in every direction at once.  For one terrifying moment, he doesn’t know what to do, or how to handle this.  He’s all of twenty-six years old and drowning in Starfleet politics that go so, so far beyond him.  
   
That moment is fleeting, and he lands sure on his feet.  Jim signs off on the report and the nondisclosure directive.  He even puts a little smiley face by his signature; what he means by it is “just you fucking wait.”  
   
By signing the report, it looks like he’s trying to save his career.  But, by the time he’s done with his own report, it’s a damn near guarantee that he won’t have a career to save.  That is to say: he’s not going down for jumping the wrong way off Marcus’s cliff.  Marcus can have and keep Harrison and _Vengeance_.  Jim has plenty of his own cliffs to jump from.  
   
 _“You ever sleep?”_ he shoots back to Carol.  
   
 _“You ever answer your communicator?”_  
   
 _“Every other Thursday and only by appointment, so you’re shit out of luck. 8-)”_  
   
Carol doesn’t respond, not that Jim expects her to.  He doesn’t think she’s the kind of person who enjoys that sort of humor.  
   
In the time it took Jim to read and accept Starfleet’s report, Riverside has slowly begun to wake for the day.  Shuttles fly overhead, ground vehicles hover down the roads, and, in the residential houses just down the street, people are coming outside to sit on their porches or do other things, like tend to their yards.  Typical Riverside.  
   
Jim puts his PADD back in his pocket and gets moving: head down, hood up, arms crossed, reclusive behavior not at all like that of a starship captain.   
   
It’s just that he doesn’t want to socialize with anyone here.  He’s been a “name” since birth, a bigger “name” since Tarsus, and an even _bigger_ “name” since _Narada_.  Being at the center of _Vengeance_ is less than helpful, in that regard.  He doesn’t want to answer questions or play along with Starfleet-approved explanations.  
   
On the bright side, he doesn’t actually expect to get much recognition, as long as he keeps his head down. Riverside is infinitesimal against the rest of the universe and constantly in flux.  The core of the population is shipyard personnel, who don’t typically stay more than three years.  It’s not uncommon for other people to come or go.   
   
Jim can count on the generational farmers, who love the land and don’t care to see beyond it; bar owners who thrive on the ebb and flow of Starfleet recruits and shipyard personnel; and then the rare person like him, or who he used to be, who stayed so long because...  
   
Well, Jim doesn’t really know.   
   
“What really was it?” Pike asked, years ago.  “That convinced you?  It’s not really because I dared you, is it?”  
   
The man knew how to make a rapport: instant, near-enough genuine, comfortable.  With Pike, mere weeks felt like the best years.  Jim knew better than to trust people like that.   
   
“Nothing better to do,” Jim answered, as if Pike would ever believe that.  Maybe Jim didn’t care if Pike didn’t.   
   
Pike’s smirk cut through Jim, straight to his twisting gut.  He felt _bad_ for dodging Pike’s question.  “Okay.  So that’s an entirely _awful_ reason.”  
   
“Yeah, well, there it is.  Are we done?”  
   
Pike’s disappointment was plainly clear: he wasn’t happy that they were still at this mostly-hostile point.  Too bad: Jim was neither a nice nor a good person.  Pike could find another goodwill project to waste his time with.  
   
“You remind me a lot of my First Officer.  A shit ton of attitude with even more potential and no one willing to give him a second chance, let alone himself.  Except, he’s not adamant on wasting that second chance, like you apparently are.  Why is that?”  
   
“I don’t know, but I’d like to stop being compared to people I’ve never met,” Jim retorted, every bit sardonic.  He regretted saying it the moment he heard his own voice: the words were like blood in the water.   
   
Pike sensed it, instantly, of course.  “At some point, James”—Jim stiffened at the use of his full name—“you’re going to have to forgive him.”  
   
Referring to Jim’s father, of course.  The man Jim knew through a digital data recording, personnel record, and a bin full of deteriorating books.  It wouldn’t be so hard, if Jim didn’t love the pieces he had.  
   
“Fuck you, _Captain_.”  
   
“And you’re going to have to stop reacting like that to things you don’t like.”  
   
Jim left without another word and didn’t give a shit if Pike put some nasty, well-deserved note in his record.  Jim ended that night with Bones putting his hands back together, knuckle by knuckle, while Jim ranted, drunk: “‘I dare you to go fuck yourself,’ is what I should’ve said.  How ‘bout that.  Fucking prick.  Like I want to be here.  Shit, Bones, my head hurts.”  
   
A painful memory, in all the ways that counted.  
   
“Nothing better to do” wasn’t the answer then and it isn’t the answer now, either for why he stayed in Riverside, or even for why he finally left.  Jim still doesn’t know what is, but he’s glad—even now, even after everything—that he’d let Pike talk him into it.  
   
He can’t say that he never looked back, because he did—often—during those first few months.  Then never, after San Francisco grew into a home, Starfleet became the future, and _Enterprise_ turned into his everything.  
   
Then never, until now.  He won’t be the captain of a warship, and he won’t be a part of another Federation-sanctioned breakdown of basic fucking decency.  Two time’s bad enough.  
   
By the time Jim reaches the Shipyard bar, he’s more than ready to begin working on his supplement report again.  He’s ready to rip and tear and come out bloody.  
   
He just has to get through Kel first.  
   
Kel—short for Kelyl—is a third-generation mix of human, Teanian, and obnoxiousness.  He’s almost enough to automatically convince Jim to just go back to the Starfleet shipyard, but something makes him _want_ to be here, at this bar, where it all ended four years ago.  
   
“Hey, Kel,” Jim greets, upbeat and casual, just like he’d been taught in command school. “Vintage Liberty, in the bottle.”  
   
Behind the bar, Kel doesn’t move. He snorts and then honest to god _guffaws._  “It’s ten in the morning.  Go back to space, Kirk.”  
   
Jim feels a headache coming on, right between his eyes.   
   
Behind him, there are whispers: the third-shift shipyard crew, definitely perking up after hearing the name “Kirk.”  Riverside has the only shipyard on Earth that’s large enough to take on _Enterprise_.  (It was _built_ for _Enterprise_.)  They all know it’s him.  
   
 _Son of a bitch._  
   
“Look,” Jim says, pointed and low.  “I need somewhere quiet to work.  I want to do it here.  So, I’ll buy a beer every now and then, so I can politely take up a table all day.  With the Academy all but shut down, you need the business, so what’s the problem?”  
   
“How about some eggs, instead?”  
   
Jim stares, beyond irritated.  He hates eggs just about as much as hates Riverside right now, which is a lot.  It’s a whole hell of a lot.  
   
“Holy black hole damn, Captain Jirk, just relax,” Kel says and pulls out a Vintage Liberty, finally.  “You were more fun back in the day, man.”  
   
Jim takes the bottle and says, as casually as he can manage, “Go to hell, Kel,” just like “back in the day.”  
   
He deftly avoids the shipyard crew and finds a seat in the very back of the bar, his back to the entrance, and boots his PADD up, as fast as he can.  The goal: “look busy.”  It’s not hard, and once he slides back into the report, he trades Riverside for Tarsus.  
   
Well, he tries to.  Memories come easy, but the words—or a position to build with those words—don’t.  
   
Tarsus was two or so really, really good years.  
   
It was pleasant extended family—Kate and Yvette Cowan on his mom’s side—who never had kids of their own but didn’t seem to mind him at all.  “Do your homework,” “go mess around with your friends,” “we’re glad you had fun with your friends, but you shouldn’t stay out so late,” “your teacher said you’re being annoying; stop that,” “clear your plate, son.”  They were the least offensive, most easygoing people he’d ever met, let alone lived with, _especially_ after Frank.  
   
It was his best friend, Jack Arakachi, who was less than half Denobulan and a year and a half older than him.  It was quiet afternoons in the rocky, gray hills above town, pouring over bits of pieces of new information about Bajor.  It was teaching himself Tellarite by painstakingly reading books in that language, nose buried between two PADDs (one had the books; the other had about twenty different dictionaries), and being told to “stop mumbling; your pronunciation sucks” and “go join Starfleet” by Jack.  
   
 _“Maybe I will.  Four more years and I can.”_  
   
 _“You know they’d take you in three.”_  
   
It was a good life, while it lasted.  It was really, really good.   
   
Jim stays at the bar, swinging back and forth between writing what he knows and researching what he doesn’t, until locals with familiar faces start to wander in.  He recognizes old Praxy Lxyn and her daughter Mary Lynn Lxyn.  Then Ardian Vi, a long-parentless kid around Jim’s age, who got burdened with the twelfth generation of the family farm.   
   
They’re not bad people.  They’re actually pretty good people.  For the past four years, they’d been as real to him as characters in long-forgotten books.  They can all probably say the same about him.  
   
Regardless of who or how well-intentioned they may or may not be, this is a sort of fire Jim doesn’t care to get burned by.  He’s blonder, thicker, and has finally sort of grown into his face, but if he stays any longer, they’re going to recognize him—and swarm around him like a colony of hungry cats.  He can only _imagine_ the questions.  
   
 _Does Starfleet even know you, Kirk?_ (They’re going to.)  
   
 _How many times have you been arrested in space?_ (Zero.  Planets are a different story.)  
   
 _Fly_ Enterprise _off any cliffs, yet?_ (Technically, yes.)  
   
 _What was it like to kill the guy who killed your dad?_   (Pretty ‘meh,’ actually.)  
   
Maybe he’s not being fair.  It doesn’t matter.  Jim slips out the back door and heads back to his apartment at the shipyard.  
   
In a too-comfortable chair by the window, Jim plays with his PADD: too exhausted to keep writing or to sleep.  He scrolls through pages of applications without accessing any of them, then scrolls sightlessly through some old subroutines he’d written through the years.   
   
On a whim, he messages Carol: _“Really, do you ever sleep?”_  
   
She’s quickly sliding into the same group of people he puts Bones, Spock, and Uhura into: people he can talk to like a person, instead of a high-ranking thing.  It’s rare.  
   
 _“No more than you.”_  
   
He’d thought so.   
   
 _“How’d you fake the transfer orders?  Asking as a fellow delinquent, not a superior.”_  
   
 _“It was a self-executing algorithm, triggered when the torpedoes were transferred.  It took a little work to set up.”_  
   
No kidding.  That would take complex, impressive code; he’s not sure he could write one as flawless as hers must have been.  _“You wrote it yourself?”_  
   
 _“Of course.  How did you reprogram_ Kobayashi? _”_  
   
Jim smiles, then almost groans.  It was only a year or so ago, but it feels like a completely different version of himself had done that.  A far stupider version of himself, with problems that extended no further than an unbeatable Academy test.   
   
 _“Not nearly as well as you faked your own transfer.”_  
   
They trade a few more comments back and forth, little “getting to know you” type things that mean nothing after what they’d witnessed together, before Jim closes his eyes, just to rest away the blurry dryness—  
   
Plumes of black smoke still crawled into the sky, marking exactly where the end of Tarsus began, weeks after the fact.  Food, medical supplies, munitions, and communications equipment alike burned: all the future, gone.      
   
In the distance, high-powered phaser fire splintered through the air.  Another body for the piles of limp, oddly-angled limbs, mottled, dirty skin, and sightless eyes.   
   
It didn’t matter how many people Kodos killed: half of them or all of them, they were all going to die, either wonderfully-fast, like the four-thousand and some lucky ones, like his family, or agonizingly-slow, like little Kevin Riley, who Jim could hide from Kodos but not from starvation and infection.  Resupply, which was _always_ at least a week late, was another month out, _minimum_.  Basic math.  
   
With a no-win like that, going to the storehouse on the northern outskirts of town wasn’t a risk at all.  It was a far-fetched hope to find anything there, borne of the logic of two desperate teenagers: _maybe, maybe, maybe, there has to be something, there has to be, please let there be._  
   
Jack and Jim together pried open two layers of powerless automatic doors, both cringing at the slow, high-pitched _creak_ the second, interior door made, as it dragged along its track.  Down the hallway, the light from outside became less and less permeating, and the storehouse became darker and darker.  
   
Jim stepped into the primary storeroom first, with his uncharged phaser at the ready.  He was lightheaded and dizzy, skin on fire and sweaty with a fever that was going to kill him before any food could save him, but _Enterprise_ had a—no, no.  That’s wrong.  _Jack and the others_ had a breath of a chance.  
   
Jim’s eyes didn’t adjust very quickly: all he saw were dark green and red spots and the faintest outlines of shelves.  The room tilted, just a little.  Jim blinked through it.  
   
“Your stupid shoes, Kirk,” Jack hissed.   
   
Jim looked down, the room spinning instead of tilting this time, and saw his blurry, neon blue shoes, the ones with reflective silver strips that just caught the barest traces of light.  Jim shrugged—what he could he do?—and stepped further in.  
   
He can change this.  He can turn around and push Jack out the way they’d come.   
   
All they’d have to do is make it three more days, and then Starfleet would respond— _critical won’t make it don’t have capabilities losing him_ _the sun rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and emotions he can’t hear you it is a far, far better thing that i do someone should be here with—_ to a distress beacon that, then, Jim didn’t know was still intact enough to be activated.   
   
He knows it now.  He knows it’s just three days away.  He knows going into the storehouse is a mistake.  
   
He can’t stop himself.  He can’t change it.  
   
Grain crunched under his shoes, just a few kernels at first, and then more and more.  He fell to his knees to feel for it.  Three, four feet away, he found the payload: a fuzzy pile of damp, cold grain and, inches beyond that, an overturned bucket.  
   
He straightened his back, still on his knees.  Jack knelt down to next to him, just a split-second before –  
   
Jim was taller, by a lot.  The metal bar hit him in the back of the shoulders.  It hit Jack in the back of the head, a horrible _crack_ mixing with the scrape of Jim’s phaser against the floor.  
   
He rolled over and backed away, sliding across the floor.  He heard a woman’s voice—one he knew so, so well—just before a bloom of pain erupted in his left knee.  She was right on top of him and the gleam of his stupid shoes.  He blocked the next hit with his left forearm and reached out with his right hand, simultaneously ripping the bar out of her hands and kicking, heel-first and hard.  
   
There was a _crunch_ and a scream, but it didn’t stop her.  Her fingers were on his face, scratching, digging, squeezing— _you should have let me sleep_ —and she was going to _kill_ him.   
   
The phaser was still in his left hand, and he used it: over and over and over again, bashing its flat side into any part of her that he could reach.  He barely registered the sharp, agonizing pain that shot through his arm with every smash.  His screams mixed with hers—nothing but white noise—until she collapsed, silent, on top of him.  
   
Jim breathed hard, sucking in one heaving, lava-tinged gasp at a time and scraping oxygen from lungs that felt like red-hot, rusted-orange grills on an old-style barbeque.  The darkness swirled, tilted, and rolled around him.  
   
His next memory was dragging Jack’s limp body into the sunlit, narrow outer corridor of the storehouse.  In the light, her sightless brown eyes were eclipsed by her blown pupils.    
   
“Jack?  Jack?  C’mon, you can’t…  Jackie?”  
   
There was blood—so much blood—all that blood, on the floor, on his hands, on his shoes.  He could taste—  
   
Jim opens his eyes.  He can feel his heart beat— _thrum, thrum, thrum_ —and the room he keeps too-cool is too-hot and sweltering.  
   
He needs to be outside.  
   
PADD clenched in his sweaty hand, Jim leaves his apartment, eyes closed to darkness inside the turbolift.  Outside, he leans against the metal, exterior wall of the building, and breathes in chilly October night air.  He wipes away dried sweat from his face and scrapes down the wall, until he’s sitting on the concrete, knees pulled to his chest.  
   
“Shit.”  
   
His heart still won’t slow down.  _Thrum, thrum, thrum._  
   
He hasn’t had that dream in _years_.  He hasn’t thought about the Cowans ( _“Jim, go; you go, take them, and don’t come back here; no matter what happens, don’t come back.”_ ), little Kevin Riley ( _“are we going to make it, Jim?”)_ , Jackie _(“I hate when you call me that, James Tiberius”)_ Arakachi, or any of the rest of them for longer than that.  And there it is – uncrumpled, retrieved from a place that had never been far enough away, like it just happened yesterday instead of thirteen, too-short years ago.  
   
Three days, and Jack would have lived.  If Jim had been a little faster—no way to precisely say how much faster—in stopping Harrison, Pike might have survived Daystrom.  One point one eight seconds longer at warp, _Enterprise_ would have been within visual range of Earth’s space dock, and Marcus...  Marcus would have needed a better lie to tell.  Funny how life works out that way, every time.  
   
“Are you all right, Captain?”  
   
Jim looks up and squints at a pair of second lieutenants.  To their credit, they look genuinely concerned, not excitedly scandalized.   
   
He smiles and nods, as if it doesn’t look awful for him to be here days too early, barefoot and just barely appropriately dressed, and sitting outside at whatever o’clock in the morning.   
   
Whatever.  There are captains with weirder quirks.  Maybe.  
   
“Just getting a little fresh air,” Jim says.  “Thank you, Lieutenants.  Enjoy your nights.”  
   
That’s captainese for “go away.”  They do, even though both of them keep looking back until he’s out of their line of sight.  
   
Jim sighs and looks over at the towering mooring assembly, which stands empty and prepared for _Enterprise_.  Within the week, she’ll be here, and, within the year, she’ll be completely refitted.  “How” depends on him and even more on a Starfleet he doesn’t believe in.  
   
They never publicly admitted that their barely-tested, disease-resistant, what-the-fuck-ever-it-was reacted catastrophically, when an exotic, foreign fungus was introduced to Tarsus IV’s food supply and crops.  Literally _overnight,_ nearly all the food was destroyed, and civilization crumbled into massacre and riot.  All of that’s in Starfleet’s classified database, down to every detail of the investigation and conclusion of, “It would have happened anyway.”  
   
Those five words still burn and turn his sight red, like they had for so many pre-Academy years that Jim had gladly forgotten.  He’s done forgetting.  
 

* * *

  
   
Later that morning, Jim goes to the Shipyard, tells off Kel (who, surprisingly, still doesn’t ask the obvious questions about _Narada_ or _Vengeance_ ; Jim respects that), and ghosts over to his table, but not before nodding at the two lieutenants from earlier that morning.  
   
He doesn’t open his report.  Tarsus is too close to him right now, and anything he writes with that in the forefront of his mind will be overly emotional and hardly useable.  Instead, he opens Carol’s information on Beta Eryx.  
   
He reads it all, and then reads some of it again, just to make sure he has it right.  
   
Beta Eryx is the giant, uninhabited wide-binary star system that Starfleet—Section 31— _whatever_ knocked out of its gravitational field.  For fifteen and a half years, it’s been in a state of undamped redshift gravitation, with two gas giants that constantly bounce back and forth, much like springs, between their two suns.   
   
What Starfleet essentially managed to do was create a volatile time dilation field and a staggeringly powerful gravitational well between the planets and the suns.  Sometimes, time runs slower.  Sometimes, time runs faster.  Never, can something that gets in get back out.  
   
Section 31 called it Project Zeta, a would-be doomsday weapon, until they lost control and two fully-manned starships: _U.S.S. Constellation_ and _U.S.S. Xavier_.  After that, Starfleet called it a naturally occurring space phenomenon, while backing as far the hell away as possible and throwing up a 100-lightyear no-go radius.  
   
Jim gently puts his PADD on the table and then his head in his hands, fingers in his hair.  
   
 _Fuck._  
   
He knows what it’s like to watch a ship split down the medial line: bulkheads buckling, viewscreen splintering, seconds to go until the ship is _gone_.  Until a year ago, it was all textbook: in case of A, probably do B, and hopefully end up with C.  No one teaches what it’s like when the world is splintering, your people are dying, and there’s nothing you can do except _hope_.  
   
 _Man, I hope there’s food in there._  
   
 _Man, I hope the warp core explosion will be enough to propel us away from that black hole._  
   
 _Man, I hope I don’t drop dead before I get this fixed._  
   
The only hope for a ship trapped in the Beta Eryx system is to die fast and die easy.  As a captain, with a crew of 479 women and men with families and lives and futures, that’s just _unthinkable_.  But it’s happened.  It’s fucking _happened_.  
   
A plate of food—it smells like one of his favorites that never makes him queasy—and a glass of bubbling soda _clink_ down on the table.  Jim lifts his head, just in time for a light slap on the back from Kel.  
   
“On me, Cap.”  
   
Jim sits blinking at the food; by the time he finds his words, Kel is already in the front, behind the counter, facing away from the bar.  
   
Like most other things in life, Riverside has its okay moments.   
   
Days pass, like they tend to do, with more okay moments but, mostly, just stretches of time at a table in a too-quiet bar with an ever-present, unopened bottle of his favorite beer.  
 

* * *

  
   
Jim’s PADD buzzes.  He eyes the message notification with a sense of dread.  It’s either Carol or Command; he really doesn’t want to deal with either.  
   
It’s neither.  It’s Spock.  
   
 _“Captain, where are you?”_  
   
Jim is relieved, despite where they’d left off with each other.   
   
 _“The middle of nowhere with a pack of Marlboro Lights.  8-)”_  
   
Jim doubts Spock will get the reference, but that doesn’t matter.   
   
Minutes pass.  Jim knows better than to wait for a response, but he stares at the PADD anyway.  He’s not sure if he wants Spock to respond.  
   
 _“Lt. Uhura wishes to inquire as to the nature of your ‘smiley face.’  Is the numeral ‘8’ intended to portray ultraviolet protective glasses or exaggerated human eyes?”_  
   
Jim thinks about that for a moment too long.  Another message comes through before he can respond.  
   
 _“Additionally, Lt. Uhura is certain that you have fled to Riverside, Iowa, your childhood home.  Is she correct?”_  
   
Jim catches himself grinning, just a little bit.  He can picture the scene back in San Francisco: mostly Uhura’s perverted delight in things like convincing Spock to write “smiley face” and being absolutely right about _everything_.   
   
Jim misses them.  He’d told Carol that crew was family, and he meant that.  He still does.  
   
 _“You mean sunglasses; take a pick; ‘fled’ is not the appropriate word here; and if Lt. Uhura wants to talk, she has my frequency.”_  
   
Jim hits “send” a split second before he realizes how that sounds.  He quickly sends a follow-up— _“not like that though”—_ and maybe gets a tiny bit of enjoyment out of the thought of Uhura trying to explain that one to Spock.  
   
A message from Uhura pops up:   _“All those poor farm animals.”_  
   
Jim smiles wide, despite how completely inappropriate that is.  They're so far beyond the people they were in this bar four years ago, but every now and then, he’s not her captain, she’s not his communications officer, and they’re just two twenty-somethings who are pretty decent at insulting each other.  In Jim’s book, that’s a solid friendship.  
   
 _“You have no idea,”_ Jim writes back.  _“Gotta go.”_  
   
He’s not just saying that.  He’s on an obsessive, passionate roll.  The words and ideas are in his head, all ready to go, and it’s a race to get them out and into some half-assed, cohesive form, before they disappear.  
   
Hours later, Jim writes to Spock: _“Tarsus IV.  Beta Eryx.  Mianda Zero.  Vengeance.”_  
   
Jim presses “send,” only a little reluctantly.  It’s doubtful, at best, that Spock knows about Mianda or Beta Eryx, but Jim’s confident the other two will provide plenty of context.  Jim doesn’t know how Spock will respond.  
   
 _“What are you doing?”_  
   
 _“Something you’re not going to like.  Used to it, yet?”_  
   
 _“If you are intending to challenge Starfleet’s reluctance to resolutely shun Admiral Marcus’s actions, then I wish to express my support.  If I can be of assistance, please advise.”_  
   
What.  The.  Actual.  Fuck.  
   
Jim puts the PADD down and takes three deep breaths, just like he’d learned as a teen.  Spock is...   
   
Spock, Jim decides, is just as confused and twisted around as Jim is, and that’s _scary_.  
   
 _“Are you kidding me?”_  
   
 _“I assure you I am not.”_  
   
 _“You’ve seen the error of your ways?”_  
   
 _“Please clarify: to what error are you referring?”_  
   
It’s (often) difficult to tell when Spock is being serious versus mouthing off.  What Jim knows for certain is that Spock’s memory is impeccable.  As is his ability to think himself infallible.  
   
When in doubt, though, _“8-)”_ is never the wrong thing to say.  It quiets Spock for more hours than Jim expects.  
   
Jim spends those hours editing: re-organizing, softening a few punches, adding teeth to others, and ensuring that this eighty-some page treatise is airtight and solid.   
   
The final paragraph is the most difficult to write, to make it clear that this report isn’t meant to be a threat: “There have always been those who mean to do us harm.  To stop them, we have awakened the same evil within ourselves.  By all accounts, Alexander Marcus strived to continue the cycle of empty loss of life in the name of hypothetical war.  The realization that we must end that cycle is his gift and our burden: a burden must carry for the victims of Tarsus IV, Mianda Zero, Beta Eryx, the Kelvin Memorial Archive, Daystrom, _Vengeance_ , and untold others.”  
   
That’s the end of it, save for one final line that he’s still kicking around in his head.   
   
He’s mostly done kicking it around, when Spock messages, _“I would like to read the report you are writing.  I trust you have had sufficient time to complete it.”_  
   
At once, Jim is both exasperated and panicked.  Firstly, Spock is an asshole sometimes.  Secondly, sharing this part of himself—this stupid report—is terrifying.  Only, if he can’t let Spock read it, then there’s no chance he can let Starfleet have it.  Without any further thought, he forwards it on, with a disclaimer: _“Read it all before you say anything.  Don’t hold back.”_  
   
As each hour of silence passes, the pit of nervous dread broiling in Jim’s gut grows bigger and bigger.   
   
On a minute-by-minute basis, he reminds himself that Spock doesn’t have days of time to burn like Jim does, but that logic buckles under the fear that he’s being obtuse about all this.  That he’s too close to what Marcus did to see straight.  That Spock was right, and Jim’s entirely wrong and willing to sacrifice the future of the Federation, just to prove a point.  
   
The only thing that’s clear is that he has too much spare time, because thoughts like those he’s always had but rarely the time to think twice about them.  
   
He fills that spare time by scrolling the report, feeling out problems.  He finds bad writing and poorly supported conclusions on pages seventy-six to eighty and fixes them.  He fills in a few cites, just to be above-reproach.   
   
And he waits.  
   
Finally, Jim’s PADD buzzes and flashes.  He grabs it so quickly he almost drops it on the floor.  (From the front of the bar, Kel laughs, loudly and still obnoxiously.)  
   
 _“Do not hesitate to submit what you have written.”_  
   
That’s almost high praise.  It’s not what Jim wants, but it will—   
   
 _“However, I feel compelled to inform you that the conclusions on page seventy-six are ill-supported, whereupon the quality of your writing significantly diminished.”_  
   
 _“Already fixed that.  That’s all you got?”_  
   
 _“Yes.”_  
   
Jim chews on the inside of his cheek, torn between disappointment and relief.  It’s fine, though.   
   
He looks back down at the glut of words on his PADD’s screen and tinkers: a word here and there.  He channels his inner-Uhura and works on precise phrasing.  He reads, reads, and re-reads, until there’s nothing left on the pages that inspire him to write more.  
   
Except the final line, which he carefully, deliberately drafts to sound less like an ultimatum and more like the moral imperative he wants it to be: “If we find ourselves unable to carry that burden, please consider this report to be my respectful resignation from _U.S.S. Enterprise_ and from Starfleet.”  
   
He submits the report.  No looking back.  No second guessing.  Done.   
   
Jim had expected to feel some sort of mythical weight lift off his shoulders, or some sort of wonderful relief, but none of that’s there.  Instead, a giant, great big swell of “oh, shit, what now?” purposelessness smacks into him.  
   
Aimless in Riverside: the story of his fucking—  
   
“You’ve got a lot of nerve, you know that?  Hi, by the way.”

 

 

2.

   
Predictably, Spock ratted Jim out, because Vulcans neither lie nor apparently keep quiet, and now Jim’s stuck with Bones not only running a tricorder every which way around his body but ranting while he does it.  
   
Jim can’t be mad.  Spock is Spock, and Bones...  Bones is almost like home: easy rhythm, old habits, auto-pilot.  
   
“You broke your cervical spine in two places.  You fractured your skull.  You crushed your sternum and who knows how many ribs—”  
   
“ _You’re_ supposed to know.”  
   
“—you _died_ of _radiation poisoning_ and then spent _nineteen days_ in a near-brain-dead coma!  Eight days later, you left the hospital against advice, and you promised me you’d stay—”  
   
“Wait, what, no, I never—”  
   
“Stop talking.”  
   
“I never promised that.  You’re making that up.”  
   
“I don’t care!  The first chance you got, you ran off.  What’s the matter with you?!”  
   
“I’m fine,” Jim says.  He knows better.  Those two words are always the spark to Bones’ super flammable kindling.  
   
“You’re jacked up on some half-assed miracle serum that could go wrong at any second,” Bones spouts.  Any moment, steam could blow from his ears.  “That’s what you are right now.”  
   
Jim blinks and sees a flash of red.  Firstly, Bones is using shitty euphemisms: the serum hadn’t worked, and he’s actually “jacked up” on the actual, honest-to-god blood of a genocidal terrorist. Secondly: “‘Half...  Half-assed’?  You never said—”  
   
“You’re lucky I don’t drag your ass back to Medical.  Don’t think for one second I’m not _strongly_ considering it.”  
   
Jim sighs and waves a hand in the air: surrender.  He has enough foresight to stop fighting this, no matter how much he wants to say, “You’re done fixing me, so back off.”  Bones _won’t_ back off, and Jim doesn’t have a chance of winning.  
   
Surrender works.  Bones deflates, just a little, a sudden, slight slouch of his shoulders and loosening of his jaw.  
   
“Back at the bar, when you said you had things to put behind you here, what did you mean?”  
   
Auto-pilot just malfunctioned.  They’re off-course in uncharted territory, deeper than Jim cares to go.  That is: it’s absolutely unlike Bones to ask something like that.    
   
It’s the unspoken truth between them that Bones knows just about everything about Jim, if not through drunken rants, then through a medical file that not even Pike could have completely sealed.  Some days, it’s claustrophobic.  Most days, it’s a relief, because if there’s anyone Jim would trust that to, it’s Leonard McCoy.  Today, it’s just confusing.     
   
Bones is waiting for an answer.  Jim meets his eyes.  In a split second, he decides how to play this.  
   
What he says next isn’t a lie, or something he’s pulled out of his ass on a whim.  Leaving Riverside four years ago changed everything, and Jim still doesn’t know _why_.  He doesn’t know where Captain James T. Kirk came from, or even how real that person is.   
   
“I need to see what’s left.”  
   
“Of what?”  
   
“Me.”  
   
Bones’ eyes go a little bit wide, but he presses his lips together and nods, as solemn as ever.  All Bones ever needs is a good enough reason.  
   
“Where are you staying, so I can at least find you?”  
   
“Starfleet accommodations, all the way,” Jim answers, forcing a smile.  
   
There’s a huge question written into the scrunched-up face Bones makes.  There’s supposed to be a house here in Riverside—the grand childhood farm house, with a corn field or whatever out back—and there’s no reason why Jim would need to room with Starfleet.    
   
Bones doesn’t ask.  Truthfully, they both know he doesn’t need to, because, given enough time, Jim will confide.  
 

* * *

  
   
Riverside is small: small for Iowa, tiny for Earth, and infinitesimal against the universe.  Everything here comes with reminders, emotions, regrets: history.  
  
  
With Spock and Bones here, two people who firmly belong in the San Francisco part of Jim’s life and nowhere at all near the Riverside part of it, the history here is overwhelming.  Humiliating.   Frightening, maybe.  
   
Like, for instance, 22: the road Jim couldn’t seem to leave behind, until someone far better than he deserved saw fit to drag his ass some place far better.   
   
Jim had driven a Corvette into the quarry just off 22; the whole town—new people, old people, doesn’t matter—knows about that.  He’d been arrested about four times at the super shitty dive further up 22: assault, battery, public intoxication, public indecency, things like that.  Over the years, there were also some other things, best left unspoken, that earned him the very apt label of “repeat offender.”  It’s not exactly the stuff biographies of Starfleet captains are made of.  
   
East on 22, to 218, then 20, and finally onto Old 35, though, is where the history is really at, especially in 2251, when he was just past eighteen and just north of Des Moines.  
   
It was a cold, dull drive up dusty Old 35.  He took it going somewhere between 95 and 105, a catacomb of twelve foot cornstalks on either side of him, and thought how absolutely un-heartbreaking it would be should he lose control or wreck a deer.  You know, go for three Kirks down, because why not, at that point?  
   
It would be about as absolutely un-heartbreaking as it was that Sam evidently never made it beyond 35.  Nine years—a lifetime to the nine year old Sam had left behind, to the nine year old who’d already spent a lifetime swallowing dread every time Sam stormed out and left an empty house of two—and Sam got as far as _Minneapolis._   Three hundred miles.  A straight drive north.  A single state up.  
   
 _“Jim, I can’t make it back.  Can you…can you handle it all?  Just do whatever.  I don’t know.  I don’t know.  I have to go.”_  
   
The bike’s speedometer climbed to 115, old tires tearing through smoothly compacted dirt and chunks of deteriorated asphalt, and he couldn’t tell the difference between rage and adrenaline.  All he knew was that it, whatever _it_ was, burned hot enough that all he wanted to do was throw his bike down, shred skin, and break bone.   
   
Some modicum of self-control, definitely not genetic, stopped him.  His hands were knuckle-white and split-red around the throttle grips, all the way to Hennepin-Scott County.  
   
He sat in the Medical Examiner's automated reception area for forty-five minutes.  For fifteen, he dead-eyed the camera, until even he got bored of himself.  He stared at his knuckles, bruised and bloody – _“Kirk, you've gotta stop this.  You've...  You've really gotta stop.  You're eighteen.  Next time, you're on charges.  Please don't have there be a next time.  Go make something of your life and quit ruining mine.”_ – and then slunk down in the chair, until his head rested on its top, and he tried to will away last night's hangover.  
   
Finally, some old lady with graying black hair and a line of blue dots on either side of her forehead—nothing else to her but a thin press of lips—led him to a lifeless, gray, small box of a room, but not before saying, “Well, there's no question he's your brother.  Best be official.”  
   
No fucking kidding.  It was almost like staring at himself, except it was his _brother_.  It was another relationship he'd – they'd – never have.  The loss slammed into him, a jumbled mess of _why why why why why why is it fucking like this why motherfucking why._  
   
“What...  What's the cause of death?”  Jim asked, inches from the glass partition between him and the room full of dead, as close as he was ever going to get again.  The muscles in his hand jerked, the split second decision to put his hand against the glass aborted.   
   
“Unintentional fall while intoxicated.  I'll give you a few min—”  
   
There was no way to lose something that didn't exist.  There was no loss.  Somewhere between her nine and a half words, Jim crumpled everything defying that logic into the tightest, smallest ball he could and threw it somewhere he wouldn't soon look.   
   
“Look, is there shit I need to sign, or what?  It's him.  He's dead.  So...  What?”  
   
The old lady blinked, just once, and handed him a PADD.  He scribbled something like “James Kirk” where it asked, wrote down Winona's coordinates for the delivery of the ashes (under special delivery instructions, typed: “so you don't need to make it back”), and left.  
   
On his bike, Jim thought about heading anywhere but southeast back to Riverside.  Maybe he could find something better, somewhere, anywhere else.  He decided against it.  If there was anything better, Sam would have found it.  It was what he'd left to discover, after all.   
   
To this day, Jim doesn’t know how he spent a lifetime being so absolutely _wrong_ , while still retaining the idiotic fantasy that he was so _right_ about everything.  
   
Like how he’d hated Sam for leaving and hated Sam for not coming back, especially after Tarsus.  (Everyone for miles and miles knows about him and Tarsus.)  Or like how he’d hated Sam for dying—especially like that—but not strongly enough to put his own head on straight.   
   
What Jim thinks now is that no one had gone looking for Sam.  No one had told Sam that he was his father’s son and that he was meant for something better.  No one had told Sam how smart he was—and, god, Sam was _smart_. Sam had no one and nothing except another nothing-town and a nothing-life.  It isn’t right.  
   
It also isn’t right that Jim probably only cares so much now, because he only now realizes how close he was to following in Sam’s footsteps.   
   
“What if I’d dared Pike to go fuck himself?” Jim wonders out loud, forgetting that Spock isn’t Bones and will have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.    
   
“What if Uhura was just some woman I hit on once in a bar?”  
   
There.  Spock _has_ to know about that.  
   
Spock drops a chunk of asphalt down the quarry, watching disinterestedly as it bounces out of sight.  Very illogical.  Jim chucks his own piece like a baseball and doesn’t care to track its progress.  Also very illogical.  
   
Over the expansive, manmade canyon, it’s a blue sky day with a fresh autumn breeze and a flock or two of geese honking overhead.  Picture perfect.  
   
“There are infinite possible universes that together comprise everything that exists and can exist,” Spock answers.  “As you are well-aware.”  
   
“How does that make you feel better?” Jim asks, very seriously.  “Does it, even?”  
   
“It is illogical to dwell on events that did not and will not happen,” Spock says, cool and neutral but not dismissive.  “The only life that concerns us is the one we inhabit.”  
   
Jim kicks a rock over the side of the cliff, a small cloud of powdered dust following the scrape of his shoe against the tan gravel.  It’s a hell of a long way down, or so a wave of vertigo informs him.  When he steps back from the edge, he doesn’t miss the way tension drains from Spock’s body.  
   
“Spock, I gotta be honest: I don’t get that,” Jim says with a shake of his head.  “You know for a fact that this...this is our second-best destiny, if even _that_.  How can that not bother you?”  
   
Spock is silent for long enough that Jim realizes it does.  For god’s sake, the man lost his _planet_ , his mother, his people.  So many more people than Jim have lost everything to this upside-down universe that isn’t supposed to exist.  It’s disgustingly difficult to remember that sometimes.  
   
Spock opens his mouth and then closes it again, a more and more common sight.  Jim waits patiently, confident that Spock won’t have anywhere near a good enough answer.  He doesn’t know why he wants to be so right about this; it’d be better to be wrong.  He knows he’s not.  
   
“I...was once told that, for people such as ourselves, the journey itself is home,” Spock finally says, carefully.  It means he’s unsure.  “As the world we’ve inherited lives in the shadow of immeasurable devastation, I find those words have become not only comforting but true.”  
   
“And when the journey ends?  What then?”  
   
Jim thinks he knows the answer: felt it when Spock Prime mind-melded with him, heard about it when he found out that his death had sent Spock into a bone-breaking rage, experienced it when Spock proved himself willing to throw away his morals, just to ensure that Jim had no excuse to find himself inside a warp core again.  
   
And now this.  
   
A sudden edge hardens Spock’s expression, adds a bite to his tone.  “I do not care to find out.”  
   
Jim swallows and looks away from his friend.  “Spock, what you’re asking—”  
   
“You misunderstand it to be a request.”  
   
Spock misunderstands that Jim has ever had the kind of control that Spock’s not-requesting.  Jim has cheated and tricked death, pretending all the while that he’s known what he’s doing.  In truth, he knows nothing, let alone how to survive.  How to live.  How to make that journey home.  
   
Not to mention that he’s all but resigned his commission. That journey’s over.  Spock just doesn’t know it yet.  
   
Lucky for Jim, he neither has to admit nor defend that, because Spock’s PADD buzzes.  For a second, Jim wonders what happened to Spock’s communicator, before he realizes that it’s likely orders from Command.  
   
Jim watches Spock’s face carefully.  It’ll all fall to Spock, like it has for the past month or so, until Command finds Jim’s permanent replacement.  That could be—probably is—what Command’s relaying right now.  
   
“I am needed in San Francisco immediately,” Spock advises, none the happier for it.  “Starfleet Command did not advise why.”  
   
That doesn’t bring relief.  Not at all.  
   
Jim nods and keeps quiet, quickly deciding to let Spock find out from Command.  It’s a cowardly move, but...  Sometimes, when he looks at Spock, all he can see is the man on the other side of the glass, and the one thing he can’t do again is see that sort of loss and hurt on Spock’s face.   
   
Together, they walk to their transportation.  Around the quarry, there’s nothing but flat, tan plains and memories.  It’s ugly and painful out here—the worst of Riverside.  The worst of him.  
 

* * *

  
   
In 2251, when Jim was just past eighteen and southeast of Des Moines, Jim burned the grand childhood farm house to the ground.  

He sat a small distance from its burning embers, with a green flannel blanket, a bag of marshmallows, a couple of sticks, a whole lot of joints, and all but daredSheriff Fucktwit Schmidt to arrest him.

“Yeah, so, I think I put water on a grease fire.  Who knew.  Marshmallow or can?”

“Kirk.  What did you do.”

“Both?”

“God damn it and you.  Give me a marshmallow.”

Jim smiled and was happy to oblige, because Schmidt was actually the reason Jim ended up getting away free and clear on most of the dumb shit he did.  For what he got caught doing, it was probation instead of imprisonment.  

Many years and a lifetime later, Pike would comment on how much “doing” it’d taken to seal and bury Jim’s criminal record, and Jim kept to himself how much had never made it into the record to start with.  The arson of the house hadn’t.  

Jim never regretted burning that house down.  George never existed; Sam was dead; neither Winona nor Frank were coming back; and the screams and tears trapped inside would never touch him again.  
   
“It’s a wonderful night, Schmidt,” Jim smiled, higher than the stars, pretending he knew what happiness could be.

Seven years later, Schmidt’s been off-planet for a year, or so Jim’s heard, and there’s nothing at the homestead except overgrown, dying weeds and wanna-be graffiti on a cracked, concrete foundation.  Technically, Jim owns the land and could do anything he wants with it.  He wouldn’t change a thing.   
   
“Jim, what the hell is this?  There’s nothing here!”  
   
The crunch of gravel and leaves under Bones’ feet mix with the drone of grasshoppers and cicadas.  Jim wraps his arms tighter around his chest, against the stiff, biting air of the unusually cold Iowan autumn, and slips his cold hands into the sleeves of his sweater.  He chews idly on the string of his hood.  
   
“I swear to god, if you’re drinking—”  
   
“I’m not.”  
   
“Or getting high...”  
   
“Bones,” Jim drawls, not warningly, but not with any humor.  “Welcome to my house.”  
   
Bones’ presence brings a warmth that wasn’t present a moment before.  The crunching footfalls have stopped just behind Jim, and he can hear Bones breathe.    
   
Jim’s mind fills in the blanks: Bones squinting into the night, past the spitting campfire, searching for the house.  Bones’ brow pulling tight, the right-side of his mouth shooting upward, and the shake of his head, just before—  
   
“Damn it, Jim, are you out of your mind?”  Nine words Jim hears daily.  “There’s no house here!”  
   
“Well, no, because I burned it down seven years ago,” Jim advises, as off-hand as he can manage.  “Try to keep up.”  
   
Jim slides over, closer to the edge of the ripped-out, leather backseat from the 2098 Camaro that he and Vin (who’d left Riverside seven months before Jim) had found in Dead Lou’s field that one time. Bones sits next to him, a little heavier than he’d probably intended.    
   
Jim holds out a half-empty bag of synthesized marshmallows, lets Bones take the entire thing, and quickly sinks back into his sweater.  
   
“Oh.  Why didn’t you just say so?” Bones asks.  This is only one of the infinite reasons why Jim loves the hell out of Bones.    
   
Bones picks up a stick, jams a marshmallow on the tip, and holds it steady over the fire.  Before he’d given up and thrown his stick somewhere into the weeds, Jim’s kept melting off.  Synthesized marshmallows especially suck that way.  
   
“You know, the crew only _suspects_ how crazy you are,” Bones says, a smile in his voice.  “You usually hide it pretty well.”  
   
That hits harder than Bones likely intended.  It uncrumples a thought that’s been mixed in with all the others: that he failed the crew in the worst way imaginable and that they deserve someone better than a crazy, used-to-be felon who only got into Starfleet because of his tragically-dead father.   
   
Jim’s stomach twists into tiny, intricate knots.    
   
“That was a joke,” Bones says, tone hard.  His hand is suddenly on Jim’s shoulder, squeezing.  “There’s nothing of you to find here, Jim.”  
   
Jim shakes his head and wishes he had a beer—anything to keep his mouth and hands occupied, to get his brain to just _stop_. _thinking_.  
   
“Everything you are, what you’ve done, and what’s happened to you, you carry with you, and it makes you a _better_ person.”  Another squeeze.  Jim just wants Bones to stop talking.  “You don’t realize how rare that is.”  
   
“Bones.”  
   
“I _admire_ that about you.”  
   
Jim rolls his eyes, but Bones can’t see that in the dark or through Jim’s hood.    
   
“ _Stop_.”  
   
“Fine.  Can I say one more thing?”  
   
“No,” Jim says, resolute and unapologetic.  
   
Bones’ marshmallow falls off the stick, the fire flaring as it devours it.  Bones mutters a curse but nothing else, at least for a few seconds.  
   
If Jim had to guess, he would guess that Bones _was_ going to say, “You never see your own worth, and it drives me the fuck nuts.”  
   
Whatever.  Bones has a metric ton of his own personal problems to worry about, and Jim doesn’t press _him_ for all those sordid details.  
   
“When I got here, I thought you were doing okay,” Bones says.  Despite himself, Jim doesn’t interrupt.  “Hell, I thought you were the best I’d ever seen you.  Now I think you coming here was a mistake.  You had the whole world, Jim, and you picked _here_.  It hasn’t done you any favors.”  
   
Jim stays quiet, long enough to hear Bones out and let the truth of the words demolish Jim’s knee-jerk defensiveness.   
   
“Sometimes, it’s okay to not be okay,” Jim says, meaning it.  “And you’re the one who always says suffering’s good for the soul.”  
   
Bones snorts.  “Only to mess with you.”  
   
Jim smiles, and then laughs.  He loves it.  “Man, I’m glad you came.”  
   
“Back at you.”  
   
Jim blinks and has trouble parsing that, until it suddenly clicks: Bones isn’t talking about Riverside.   
   
Oh.  
   
Jim leans back, arms wrapped even tighter around himself, and stares into the night.  The sky is clear, and the stars overhead burn crisply, more familiar than anything he’s ever known.  
 

* * *

  
   
One year ago, _Enterprise_ was a lot of things.  Points ( _all_ the points, and they were _his_ ). Proof (he was going places).  History (newest ship, youngest captain).  Fun (Constitution-class, baby).  And then there was all that stuff about responsibility and not getting her too terribly destroyed.  
   
If Jim was at all nervous, in the four months between limping _Enterprise_ home and getting her back up and running, he doesn’t remember being so.    
   
He remembers being on the hook for a 200 and some page dissertation on a topic of his choosing, like every other starship captain.  That sucked.  
   
He remembers getting pushed into accelerated senior-command level classes, inside an emotionally-ruined Academy with empty halls.  That sucked, too.  
   
What didn’t suck were the daily chess matches with Pike at Starfleet Medical.  He remembers those well and fondly.  Most of all, he remembers feeling overwhelmingly young—in a good way—and being given loads of free advice that he should’ve written down or recorded or _something_.    
   
Except Pike was invincible. Pike was forever.  Pike was everything Jim knew people could never be.  
   
“There’s no such thing as ‘blind luck,’ Jim.  Learn that now, because it’s not a lesson you survive.”  
   
Maybe it was the twenty-five year old in him doing the thinking, but Jim didn’t think he needed survival lessons.  If Jim could do one thing, and one thing only, it was survive, forget the odds.    
   
He could also deflect.  “And you finding me in Riverside?  What was that?”  
   
Pike blinked and looked down, the most unsure Jim had ever seen him.   In an instant, without a doubt, Jim knew for fact something he’d never suspected.   
   
 _Son of a bitch._  
   
“No, that wasn’t blind luck.  I came to Riverside looking for you.”  Pike smiled, and Jim recognized it as the smile Pike always had before he said something heartwarmingly insulting.  “You were pretty easy to find, by the way.”  
   
Jim gave Pike one of his own smiles for that one.  It was true enough.  It’s just that—get the violins out—not many came looking, especially not the ones who mattered.  Truth be said, Jim liked/loved/accepted—in that order—the version of his life where Chris Pike wasn’t an accidental acquaintance.  
   
“So, you’re not mad?”  Pike asked, like it’d matter if Jim was.  Maybe to Pike it would.  
   
Jim shook his head.  “No.”  
   
“You’re not going to ask why?”  
   
Jim raised his eyebrows, frowned, and kept shaking his head.  “Nope.  Don’t need to.”  
   
“You’re that sure?”  
   
“Yep.”  
   
Pike shrugged, and his body language telegraphed the told-to-death joke lightyears ahead of time.  “Yeah, those recruiting quotas are a real pain in the ass.  Have fun with those.”  
   
Jim had a snappy retort all ready to go, when a nurse walked in and Pike groaned, very will-be admiral-like.  That was the end of that.  Jim pushed their pathetic excuse for a chess game to the side and stood up.  
   
“Tomorrow?”  Jim asked.  
   
“Tomorrow,” Pike confirmed with a nod.   
   
When tomorrow happened, Pike had no advice to give.  Not that day.  Instead, he talked about growing up in Mojave and a horse named Tango.   
   
“I loved that damn horse,” Pike said, a wistful smile kind of weird on his face.  “Had to put him down after he broke his leg.  That was hard.”  
   
“He really liked sugar cubes, right?”  Jim wasn’t asking.  He knew it for a fact.  “You kept them in your pocket.  And he wouldn’t touch the synthesized kind, so you had to find real sugar, which is, yeah.  You’ve told me all this before.  Check.”  
   
Except, Jim hadn’t known about the weird picnics or that Pike had to put Tango down.  Admittedly, he also couldn’t remember having any prior conversation about a horse; then again, there’d been a few Sunday mornings when Pike’d thought raising his eyebrows high enough would make Jim less “nope, still drunk, Captain.”  Those conversations were hazy, at best.  
   
Pike didn’t say a word, and it was Jim’s turn to raise his eyebrows, prodding.  Pike stared at him, another weird expression on his face.  Jim wondered if he should call for a nurse.  Brain stem damage was pretty serious, and, god, maybe Pike was having some sort of really slow ons—  
   
“When did I tell you all that?”  
   
Jim shrugged, relieved.  “I don’t know.  But you did.  What, _you_ don’t remember?”  
   
“No, I’m just surprised that you do,” Pike answered, and he was trying to be casual about it, but his eyes were suddenly red and maybe even a bit shiny.  “And what do you mean, ‘check’?  Kirk, are you cheating again?”  
   
There was _something_ there.  Something.  Jim didn’t know what.  
   
That day, Jim let it go.  He had a ton on his mind—classes, surprise dissertations, command responsibilities, convincing Spock to stay on—and meant to ask Pike about it, sometime later.  
   
He forgot.  
 

* * *

  
   
Jim spends another day at the bar, another unopened bottle of Vintage Liberty accompanying him through the hours of reading and writing standard reports, as well as kicking crew recommendations and commendations over to Spock for submittal.   
   
It feels wrong and fake, to spend the day working, as if he was on _Enterprise_ or back in San Francisco.  One, he’s not really allowed to be working right now; “leave” is leave. Two, it’s not his command anymore, and, frankly, he’s tired of waiting for Command to make that official.  
   
Work, at least, gives him something to do, besides wallow.  A time not so long ago, he _would_ _have_ wallowed, gloriously so: drank himself into stupor, dragged along anyone who would come (usually Bones, who’s a god damned saint), and let himself be defeated.  If being in Riverside has shown him anything, it’s that he never wants to be that person again.   
   
Jim’s PADD buzzes loudly against the table.  It’s not Spock, as Jim had at once both hoped and feared.  It’s Bones.  
   
 _“_ _Medical exam.  Now.”_  
   
Jim looks at the time and groans.  He’s twenty minutes late.  Not good.   
   
Jim hauls it to the Starfleet medical center near the shipyard and finds Bones waiting outside for him, all stony glares and a locked, set jaw.   
   
“Hey, I’m s—”  
   
“Get your ass into Room 3.”  
   
Jim does as told and waits twenty minutes for Bones to follow him in.  Fair enough.   
   
“Deep breath.”  
   
Jim obliges.  
   
“And out.  Panic attacks?”  
   
Jim nods, resigned to this.  
   
“Better, worse, same?”  
   
“Same.”  
   
“Describe them.”  
   
Bones is all physician right now: calm, detached, clinical, all about the assessment and diagnosis.   
   
And Jim?  Jim’s used to this.  Hospital-like settings, like this clinic, don’t put him at ease, but they definitely flip a switch in his head to _off_ and, god help him, _obey_.  Eight months between three hospitals at thirteen-almost-fourteen would do that.  
   
“They’re mostly when I sleep.”  
   
Bones taps something into his PADD.  It doesn’t concern Jim; if he wants to read what Bones is writing, he’ll look.  
   
“Okay.  Keep going.”  
   
Jim doesn’t want to keep explaining all the ways he’s fallen apart.  That how no matter how much he doesn’t want to be the person Pike found here four years ago, it’s sometimes not enough to want something.  None of that is for Bones, or anyone else, and Jim can’t—  
   
“Jim,” Bones huffs, like he’s gearing up for something big, “I’m so fucking done with you right now.  We’re going back t—”  
   
“I can’t sleep!” Jim interrupts, loudly and with a shrug.  An unspoken “what do you _want_ from me?” hovers in the air between them.  “I can’t sleep.  When...  If I do, it’s, like, an hour, and I have nightmares.”  
   
Bones says nothing for a good five seconds.  Jim resists the urge to roll his eyes and say something mocking.  Instead, he looks down and keeps his mouth shut.  
   
Finally, Bones asks, “You still terrified of giving yourself hypos?”  
   
Jim blinks and looks back up, only a little weary of Bones’ turnaround.  He doesn’t have the emotional energy to debate how he is definitely _not_ “terrified” of anything, let alone a hypo spray.   
   
“Depends on what you’re offering,” he replies.  
   
“I’m a doctor, not a drug dealer” – any other day, Jim would _definitely_ debate that – “so how ‘bout a basic somatic inducer that’ll knock you clean off your ass in about thirty minutes flat?”  
   
That sounds like it’s worth a shot, though it’s really a testament to how close to the edge Jim is. Jim nods and stares past Bones at the far wall.    
   
He feels twenty-two and damaged, just like that first day four years ago, with Bones—although he wasn’t Bones then; he was just that drunk, alleged Dr. McSomething from the shuttle—popping an eyebrow at the blood splatter on Jim’s shirt.  Apprising, judging, wondering.  
   
“And this back and forth?  Where you seem all-in and ready to go, and then you’re despondent and barely here?” Bones asks.  “What’s that?”  
   
Jim’s eyes snap to Bones.  He tries hard to not feel attacked.  He’s suddenly restless, like he needs to burst out of his skin to survive.    
   
“I don’t know what that is,” Jim says.  
   
“Do you recognize that you’re doing it?”  
   
Jim takes a deep breath, rolls his shoulders, and goes all in, desperate to get out of here and be _anywhere_ else:  “Yes.  I’ll cooperate with whoever you recommend in San Francisco.   _Enterprise_ docks tomorrow afternoon, and I’m going back afterward.  Good enough?”  
   
The worry soldered all over Bones’ expression is less than encouraging.  “I don’t like that you’re offering.  Is it really that bad?”  
   
“I have an example to set for the crew,” Jim lies, sort of.  He _does_.  “And Starfleet doesn’t need any excuses.”  
   
Bones is unconvinced, but Jim doesn’t care.  He takes just two hypos and walks the short distance “home,” where a flustered yeoman sort-of-respectfully gripes that he’s been waiting for Jim all day and hands him a plain box from Spock.  
   
Inside, Jim puts the box on his coffee table and looks at his PADD.  Waiting there is a new, receipt-activated message—well, more like a book—also from Spock.  
   
It’s three bombs. Three gigantic bombs.   
   
Jim sits down, dizzy, mouth dry, his legs a lot like overcooked spaghetti.  He reads the message over and over again, waiting for the words to make sense.  Because they don’t.   
   
 _“Admiral Pike’s possessions have been distributed, as per his Will.  As I did not think you would care to wait, I have forwarded his bequeath to you in Riverside._  
   
 _Additionally, Starfleet Command has approved and expedited your recommended repairs and refits; as such,_ Enterprise _is now ahead of schedule and will arrive tomorrow morning at 1030._  
   
 _Finally, you may wish to know that Admiral Barnett is personally opening public investigations, research initiatives, and official disciplinary inquiries into the problems outlined in your report.  He also personally asked me to tell you that your proposed resignation will neither be required nor accepted; however, per Federation Regulation 990(A)(6)(i), it is a disciplinable offense for a flag officer to neglect their communicator, even during a leave of absence, as you have done._  
   
 _Jim, you should have told me.  Regardless, congratulations.  If you require anything further, please advise.”_  
   
No matter how many times he reads it, the words don’t change.  They slowly sink in, until he realizes that this...  This is not the expected storm of raging shit.   
   
Hand shaking, he forwards Spock’s entire message to Carol, without any commentary of his own.  He needs to hear her take on it: too good to be true, or a turn of events that she—  
   
 _“Admiral Barnett is a good man.  You’re the only surprise, and I mean that in the best way possible.  Your report was incredible.  Thank you, Captain.”_  
   
Jim blinks and leans back, mentally sliding the pieces of Carol’s puzzle together.  When it clicks, he feels...  He has no idea how he feels.  “Less accomplished” is a good start.  
   
She hadn’t been helping him; he’d been helping her, as the too-young martyr.  No one would listen to Carol Marcus, not after what her father had done, but they might listen to a James Kirk who’d been shoved in the right direction.  
   
He gets it.  He might even be okay with it.  And maybe—a huge maybe—he’s even a little reassured by the idea that, all along, Carol had thought that Barnett, her father’s successor, could pull Starfleet back from _Kelvin_.  
   
Jim considers sending something back, but he decides to leave well enough alone.  Or, at least, to cool off and see her in person, before saying anything else.   
   
He sets his PADD to silent and puts it aside.   
   
There’s a box sitting on his coffee table, not forgotten, from Pike.  
   
“Shit.”  
   
Pike is the only part of this mess that he’s cried over: hot, stinging simmers and the complete lack of wherewithal to fight them.     
   
There have been plenty of people Jim couldn’t cry over, no matter how long he sat and tried to will himself to just drop a tear.  Family, friends, peers, colleagues: not a drop.  Being able to cry over Pike, even at random times that take him by surprise, is a relief, because Jim owes Pike _at least_ his tears.  
   
And Pike owed Jim nothing.  Here it is anyway.  
   
There are two items inside the box.  The first is Pike’s ancient, handmade chess set, the same one they’d used all throughout the Academy and over the past year.  There had to have been someone better to give that to.  Spock, probably.  Boyce or his old First Officer, even.  Jim reverently sets it aside.  
   
The second item is a hardback book called “A Tale of Two Cities.”  It smells old and musty, the way books are supposed to smell.  On the inside front cover, in black ink so faded that Jim wonders exactly when Pike wrote it, is a simple: _Jim, take care of yourself.  Chris Pike._  
   
Jim closes the book and sets it on the coffee table, far away from the hard, heavy tears he can’t control.  
   
Heartache isn’t some fake, pretend drama bullshit.  It’s _real_.  Sometimes, recognizing that means crying one’s grown ass self to sleep, heaving, breathless sobs and all, hypos untouched.  
 

* * *

  
   
Early the next morning, Jim beats the sun.  He doesn’t go to the bar.  
   
He starts with a lazy jog, down mostly the same route he’d taken every day for years that bleed together into one, big blur of flat-lined waste.  His muscles strain and lungs tire easily, even going just a sliver of his usual pace.   
   
Screw that.  
   
Jim runs faster.  
   
At the Academy and during downtime, Jim would run through San Francisco, losing himself every way he knew how, every single day.  In the rain, in the sun, in the cold, at two in the afternoon or two in the morning: it didn’t matter.    
   
During any _Enterprise_ mission longer than an overnight, he’d run the lower decks.  The crew got so used to it that they largely ignored him, except to say “good morning” or “good evening.”  
   
Since the transfusion, he’s been afraid to test how deep Harrison’s blood flows.  He’s been afraid to run, something so simple and innate to him.  
   
Jim doesn’t care how difficult it is to push his body back into this rhythm.  He’d climbed a warp core, bones broken, body irradiated, and made it back out, alive enough to die.  By comparison, this is ridiculously _nothing_.  
   
He makes it a clean eight kilometers, destination firmly in mind, relying on muscles that feel brand new and lungs that may or may not have ever been pushed this far (Jim’s still not exactly clear on the extent of the meaning of “your cells were heavily irradiated”), but he makes it, scraping oxygen from lungs that feel red-hot, one lava-tinged gasp at a time.  
   
By the time he gets where he’s going, he could just about die.  He doesn’t feel superhuman, and he doesn’t feel dead.  He feels like himself, only less fit, more sore, and a little new.  He closes his eyes and breathes, doubled over, hands on his knees, trying to level out a body that’s booting back up, one system at a time.  
   
The overall feeling is so similar to the core, that Jim braces for the inevitable panic attack.  It doesn’t come.  Not this time.  Jim takes a shuddering breath anyway and, for good measure, hocks a glob of sticky, warm spit onto the gravel.  
   
The place he’s run to is Riverside’s old casino/sports complex/casino again/who knows what came next/currently derelict building that’s probably going to collapse soon.  It’s only two stories, and the climb to the roof is easy and familiar.    
   
Along the back edge of the roof, near a line of old condensers and diffusers, there are soggy remnants of half-smoked joints and empty bottles of beer, all more or less where he’d left them years ago.  This roof used to be his one-of-many perfect places to hide—really, that’s all Riverside has ever been to him.  It seems more like a grave now.  
   
Today, the roof is the perfect place to watch _Enterprise_ come in.  Jim leans against one of the condensers and pulls Pike’s book out of his bag, content to spend the morning living inside a new, old novel, until _Enterprise_ flies overhead.  
   
Only, there’s something of a problem.    
   
The words are familiar, in the faintest sense.  Written on the pages, they’re unfamiliar, but, in Jim’s head, they’re old and rote. He knows he’s heard them before—and not just the popular, overused passages, which _of course_ he’s heard before.  The book’s an Earth classic, just not one Jim ever got around to reading, not with a universe full of literature.  
   
On a hunch that he knows is wrong before he acts on it, Jim pulls his PADD out of his bag and messages Spock: _“hey, have you ever read A Tale of Two Cities?”_  
   
The answer is near instantaneous:   _“Of course.”_  
   
Jim narrows his eyes.  “‘Of course.’  What the hell’s that.”  
   
 _“To me?”_   Jim writes back, only feeling a little self-conscious.  
   
 _“No.”_  
   
“Well, shit.”  
   
Jim puts his PADD aside and continues reading the book, more and more curious, faster than typical.  He’s more invested in the nostalgic, _I know this_ feeling the words evoke than in the actual book itself.  It’s a shame, because it’s something that he would otherwise devour, absorb, and research, until he knew its world in every detail.    
   
At 1030, on the dot, _Enterprise_ doesn’t fly overhead.  She’s tethered to and carried by a freighter: charred, skeletal, a year old and dead, a grave of her own.  It’s one thing to see the hologram and digital images; it’s another thing entirely to see it in person.    
   
As the ships pass overhead, Jim’s body tenses with adrenaline, his gut twisting into loops, and he closes his eyes to the blitz of wind that makes it near impossible to breathe.    
   
He centers himself with a deep breath and tucks away the book and his PADD.  By the time he makes it back to the apartment, showers, and changes clothes, _Enterprise_ will be fully docked and moored.   
   
And.  
   
He has an apology to give.

* * *

  
   
Mentally, Jim knows exactly what to expect.  In reality, it’s more difficult to be back on _Enterprise_ than he ever expected.  
   
 _Enterprise_ is a ghost, her hallways empty and dim.  Repairs won’t begin until after the weekend, which means the specialized, Constitution-class repair crew hasn’t arrived yet.  In some ways, it’s a gift, because Jim doesn’t need the attention.  
   
In other ways, it’s crushing. _Enterprise_ is supposed to be at full crew capacity, in full swing as the Federation’s flagship on a peacekeeping mission to the Selona System, not crippled for the second time in half as many years.  
   
Jim doesn’t spend long exploring.  He’d seen enough of the damage before going into the core and has spent plenty of time pouring over her refits.  He doesn’t need to see or review any of it again.  Ever.    
   
Also, most of the ship is off-limits, even to him, due to near-catastrophic structural damage.  The bridge, damn near torn in half, is one of those places.  Most of the rest is inaccessible: without a core, there’s no power, and good luck getting anywhere worthwhile without turbolifts.  
   
He finds his way to Engineering, the only place he came to visit today.  He expects to find Scotty, probably Keenser, and _maybe_ Chekov.  There’s a little pit of dread in his stomach.  
   
Jim finds Scotty, and only Scotty, by where the core used to be.  The new one won’t be installed until a year from now; until then, the core chamber is cordoned-off, an empty space at the heart of the ship.  It’s nothing he hasn’t seen before, or so he tells himself.  
   
There are things Jim wants to say—“I’m sorry,” being the first—but it’s not the right way to start off.  
   
“You didn’t owe me an apology, Scotty,” Jim says, without greeting or introduction.  “You don’t, for any of it.”  
   
Scotty turns his head a little but doesn’t turn completely around.  His arms tighten where they’re crossed against his chest, and his back stiffens.    
   
“You’re a bloody bampot.”  
   
Jim has no idea what a “bampot” is, but he guesses it’s nothing good.  Also, he’s used to Scotty’s random nicknames and insults.  He knows when Scotty’s serious and when Scotty is posturing. Scotty’s almost always posturing, but not today.  
   
“Probably, but I brought you a sandwich, and Bones is trying to find his stash of booze in the medbay, so…”  
   
Scotty’s shoulders slump.  “You had no right.”  
   
Well, no, it was solely Jim’s right, his responsibility alone.    
   
He grew up knowing exactly how _Kelvin_ lost two captains within twelve minutes—knowing exactly what being captain means.  It means losing everything except the crew.  It means losing your future; it means children not having a parent; it means making _the_ decision and sticking it out, right until the petrifying end.    
   
The fallacy of Jim’s life up until forty days ago was the belief that it just wouldn’t happen to him: that he was better, smarter, luckier.  That he was infinite.  That Rick Robeau and George Kirk were a couple of idiots who hadn’t tried hard enough.  
   
“Scotty,” Jim says, packing all of that into one word.  “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you.  I’m sorry I hit you.  And I’m sorry that the core had to happen, but I’ll never be sorry for doing it.”  
   
Scotty turns around, finally.  There’s nothing of his usual laid back, good humor: just a sunken, drawn face, a painful reminder that Jim is in the good company of those also affected by the last forty days.  
   
Jim doesn’t expect Scotty’s sudden embrace, but he welcomes it.  It’s not a back-slapping, welcome-back sort of hug; it’s the hold-on-for-dear-life, holy-shit-you’re-alive kind.  It feels warm and good, and Jim squeezes back, as hard as he can.  Behind the glass, this sort of physical connection is all he’d wanted.  
   
“Do you have any idea what you did?   _You died_.”  
   
Jim doesn’t answer—doesn’t have any idea what his answer would even be—and just nods dumbly, though Scotty can’t see it.  
   
Scotty pulls away, leaving a sudden dearth of warmth in his stead, and sniffles, just once.    
   
“It’s good to have you bac—”  
   
“Commander, as you suspected, the plasma deflector was misa— _okh, yebat'!_ —Captain!”  
   
Chekov.  This is exactly what Jim had hoped to avoid: things to say to the crew after coming back from the dead.   
   
Jim turns and regards Chekov with a tight, fake smile.  “Mr. Chekov, it’s good to see you.”  
   
Chekov’s eyes are wide, and his mouth is pressed into a thin line.  Jim suddenly wonders how much of an apology he owes Chekov—for everything that day.  
   
“You appear well, Captain,” Chekov says, voice crackly and unsure.  “I...  I must check on final component.”  
   
Chekov turns and hustles out of the bay, “I am; thanks” dying on Jim’s lips.  On the bright side, Jim thinks, at least he’s not the only one with absolutely no idea how to move forward.  
   
“He helped remove your body from the decontamination chamber,” Scotty says from behind, matter-of-fact and even.  Shaming, almost.  “You died with your eyes open, you know.  I’ve been an engineer for longer than you’ve been alive, and _I’d_ never seen anything like that.  What can you expect from him?”  
   
A swell of anger threatens to dictate where Jim goes next with this.  He could scream and tear apart a room—he’s good at that—but _no_.  He’s been on uneven ground, emotionally out-of-control since forever, and he’s _sick_ of it.   
   
“You’re not that old, Scotty,” Jim decides to say, the bubble of tense anger in his gut bursting.  “And he’ll get over it.”  
   
Jim had seen family, friends, neighbors, people he’d known and liked, eyes wide dead in mass graves.  The woman Jim had killed with a broken phaser was named Meredith Orenta.  She knew how to make a rapport: instant, near-enough genuine, comfortable.  She always smiled and squeezed his shoulder, never a bad thing to say about anyone.  She cooked an amazing potato sort of thing and cut his hair every month.  When Tarsus ripped itself apart, she’d just about killed him for a pile of moldy grain.  
   
Point being: if he could survive _that_ at thirteen, then Chekov could certainly survive a shitty day at work—that _everyone_ was trained for—at eighteen.  They all could.  Maybe it’s a harsh, unforgiving stance, but it’s one Jim believes in.  
   
“You, uh, said something about a sandwich, then?”  
   
“Yeah, yeah, here,” Jim answers and holds out a brown-wrapped something-or-other from a nice-ish, all-synthesized restaurant in town.   Jim cares more about the gesture and Scotty will eat anything, which is good, because he’s sure that, by now, the bread has imprints of his fingers in it.  
   
Scotty silently takes the sandwich.  It’s never been this awkward, this _hard_ between them, not even when Jim was trying to convince Scotty to sink his career on the advice of some guy purportedly from the future.  How was _that_ easier than _this_?  
   
“Are you staying, then?  For the repairs?”  
   
Jim shakes his head and shoves his hands into his pockets.  “Can’t.  I’m going back tonight.  Thanks for staying on and overseeing it all.”  
   
As if Scotty, or any other chief engineer worth a damn, would be anywhere else.  
   
“Well, _most_ of the booze is all wrecked to shit,” Bones’ voice carries through the bay.  “You owe me some nice stuff, Jim.  I mean _real_ nice.”  
   
Bones comes into view, with, surprisingly, a single bottle of some sort of dark, hard liquor in his hand.  It’s more than Jim expected him to find intact.   
   
As Bones comes closer, Jim can see the label: Jasenoff Smooth.  It’s a half a step above poison.  Of course it survived.  As far as Jim’s concerned, Bones can keep it.  
   
“One, you demolished _my_ real nice stuff a couple nights ago.  Remember that?  Two, you don’t hear Scotty complaining about what happened to the still, do you?”  
   
Scotty shakes his head, hands up, sandwich included.  “No.  What?  There’s no still on _Enterprise_.  That would just be disrespectful.  But, should there have been one, hypothetically, I would imagine that it got smashed to tiny little wee bits.  Quite a shame.  Hey, did I ever tell you about the beetles on Xhanu X?”  
   
When Jim hears Bones groan, his interest in Scotty’s story skyrockets.  The topic is a total deflection on Scotty’s part, but Jim doesn’t so much care.  (After all, Jim had been the one to suggest, via Sulu, to add a polarity dampener in the tube couplings of the still, which, yeah: _so_ much better.)   
   
Scotty doesn’t wait to begin.  “These beetles!  They were the size of a shuttle!  A _shuttle_ , Jim.  With these sharp pinchers and a million and two wee beady eyes and oh, you would've shit your ass, believe you me!”  
   
“A couple weeks ago, these beetles were the size of your _head_ ,” Bones disputes, even as he opens the bottle of poison (in no world is that shit considered whiskey) and takes a seat on the floor.  
   
“Wait, why were you on Xhanu X?  When was this?” Jim asks, ignoring everything else.  A shuttle or a head: doesn’t matter.  Xhanu’s beetles are, on average, just about average; not particularly scary; and run from themselves, not to mention other species.  
   
“ _Years_ ago, Laddie,” Scotty says, waving a hand in the air.  “And ‘why’ doesn’t matter.”  
   
Jim shrugs and sits on the floor, next to Bones.  He waves away the surprise offer of a drink and passes the bottle over to Scotty.  “Okay, so, you’re on Xhanu X, and these ginormous beetles are...?”  
   
Scotty grimaces down a swallow of whiskey before answering, “Coming _right_ at me.  At least _fifty_ of’em!”  
   
“Bullshit,” Bones mutters.  
   
“Probably eighty, actually.  Ninety, even.”  
   
“And you didn’t stun them, because...?”  
   
“Excuse you me?” Scotty sputters, the way only Scotty can when he’s trying to make others believe he’s taking his own ridiculous stories seriously.  “Were you there, Captain?  I don’t think so!  These buggers—no pun intended—were un-phaser-able.”  
   
Jim cocks his head and can’t stop a smile, and then a laugh.  He can feel Bones’ eyes on him, but it only makes him laugh harder.  “I’m sorry,” Jim struggles, but breathing has suddenly become difficult. Jim buries his red face in his arms.  
   
“Now just hold right on!  It’s not funny!  I could’ve been killed!  They were the size of _shuttles_!”  
   
“But not bigger than the Karakurt spider!”  
   
“Great,” Bones snipes, voice a little rough from another drink of the poison, “Chekov’s been around _you_ so much, that now even _he’s_ telling ridiculous stories.”  
   
“I haven’t the foggiest idea what you mean.  But I’m insulted.”  
   
Jim sucks in a deep breath and regains control of himself.  He looks up and over, to where Chekov is self-consciously standing, knuckles tight around a PADD.  Suddenly, Jim has no trouble sobering himself.  
   
“Get over here and sit down,” Jim says, tone light enough for it to be an offer instead of an order.  
   
Chekov obliges, sitting between Bones and Scotty.  He takes a long drink from the whiskey bottle and doesn’t so much as grimace.   
   
Jim grimaces for him. There used to be rumors on _Enterprise_ about Chekov’s ability to drink just about anything—rumors Jim chose to ignore, as Chekov only recently became old enough to drink.  Seeing it in person, though?  Jim can only think, _terrifying.  Absolutely terrifying._  
   
“The Karakurt spider is the biggest in Russia.”  
   
“Oh, not the whole world anymore?”  Bones asks, with only 100% sarcasm.  “There’s a surprise.”  
   
“Also, the whole world.  As well as many others!”  
   
“Your spiders are nowhere _near_ these beetles, Lad.  How many times do I need to tell you that?”  
   
Jim leans back against the bulkhead and simply enjoys listening to Scotty and Chekov squabble over beetles and spiders, their contentions growing more and more ludicrous with every rebuttal.   
   
Jim loves it: every second, every word, every bit of it.  They’re the best crew, the best people, on the best ship.  They make him a better person, in every way he can think of.  With them, he can be everything.  Without them, he—  
   
There’s a sudden squeeze on Jim’s thigh.  Jim glances over to find Bones looking at him with a suggestion of a smile.  There’s also a question there, an easy one to read: _are you done not being okay?_  
   
Jim returns the smile and nods, perhaps more in confirmation to himself.  
 

* * *

  
   
On the shuttle back to San Francisco, Jim falls into an uneasy sleep, “A Tale of Two Cities” unread in his lap.    
   
Plumes of black smoke seeped into the watercolor sky.  Splinters of phaser fire sizzled through the air.  In the far distance, there were black, blurry figures. Jim blinked tiredly at them, against the burn of the setting sun, his eyes like cold marbles.  He didn’t fear the figures, whatever or whoever they were.  What could they do?   
   
There was almost nothing left.  Jack was dead.  He was closer to his own death than he’d been just minutes ago: his left arm and knee felt broken, and there was a weird feeling in his back.  The only thing left to do was try not to be someone else’s food.  
   
That was his kind of a goal.  
   
Just northeast of the storehouse, there were quiet afternoons in the rocky, gray hills above town.  That’s where he went: one excruciating step at a time, one foot in the front of the other, one scraping breath after the last and another after that.  If the black figures followed, Jim neither noticed nor cared.  
   
Just after the sun disappeared below the vanilla-purple horizon, Jim wedged himself between two steel-gray boulders.  Under the frigid night sky, the stars were unfocused beams of white.  He missed the constellations, with all their promises of more, and he wondered, so stupidly, what the language was like on Bajor and what kind of books they might have there.  
   
It would all still be there, even without him.  That was a good, comforting thought.  
   
Jim closed his eyes.   
   
His death was an absolute.  If the infection behind the fever, chills, and coughing didn’t take him, then Kodos would.  Either way: end game.  
   
He opened his eyes to the hazy blur of a starship with narrow, square corridors and matte, dark gray walls.  Lights overhead blurred past, and there was a flurry of words and voices and faces over him, he didn’t—  
   
“Fifty mil cordrazine!”  
   
His eyes were heavy.  He blinked and blinked again, the starship bleeding to black and then back again.  He couldn’t—  
   
“You’re on _U.S.S. Expedient_.  You’re safe.  Hey, kid, look at me!  Stay with me!”  
   
He didn’t feel safe.  His body felt strange, and he couldn’t keep his eyes open against the dragging pull of _sleep, sleep, sleep_.  
   
“That’s it!  There he goes!  We’re losing—”  
   
It wasn’t  like sleep, not really. It was more like drifting through cold, cool blackness: further and further and further away.  It was almost like drowning, not a breath left in his body, but it was peaceful and good.  
   
“—had this horse named Tango.  Don’t ask.  It’s a dumb story behind the name.  Anyway, the damned thing loved sugar cubes, so much so that I had to keep them in my pocket.  But only if it was real sugar.  He wouldn’t _touch_ it, if it was synthesized.  Do you have any idea how hard it is to find real sugar?”  
   
The voice was more than a voice: it was an anchor.  It was warmth.  It was safe.  
   
“Chris, I’m telling you, he can’t hear you.”  
   
“Phil, I’m telling you, I don’t care.  Someone should be here with him—”  
   
He floated, in and out, sometimes aware and other times just _gone._  
   
“—you like books?  Your father did.  I do.  And, honestly, I’m shit out of things to say—”  
   
“—sun rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and emotions—”  
   
“It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever—”  
   
“—critical.  Look, Chris, we’re almost there.  We need to get him ready for transport.  And you need to go be captain.  Or go to sleep.  You tell me.”  
   
“Yeah, one more minute.  James, you have a whole life ahead of you.  Do you understand that?  A whole life.  It doesn’t end here, and it sure as hell didn’t end back there.  You...  Christ, you’re too young for this.  Listen.  You take care of yourself—”  
   
“Jim.  Damn it, Jim, wake the hell up.”  
   
Jim snaps awake, the burn of adrenaline tensing his body.  The dream doesn’t dissipate into half-remembered feelings and somethings less than memories.  Jim holds onto enough of it to _know_.  
   
Jim rolls his head over and looks at Bones, who, as always, just seems exasperated.  
   
“Holy shit, Bones!”  Jim says, loudly.  “Holy motherfucking _shit_.”  
   
“My feelings exactly, with you and all the damn scenes you like to make,” Bones says, eyes never leaving his PADD.  
   
Jim ignores that.  “How far out?”  
   
“About ten minutes.  Now, remember, you agreed to counseling.”  
   
Jim ignores that, too.  
   
Ten minutes is plenty of time to pull his PADD out and dig into Pike’s service record—just to make sure.  
   
Except, there’s no digging about it.  The information is basic and easily available; he just never had a reason to look for it before now.  
   
In 2246, Christopher Pike was the newly-appointed captain of _U.S.S. Expedient_.  His third mission out was an emergency humanitarian aid and relief effort to Tarsus IV.   After two days in Tarsus IV’s orbit, _Expedient’s_ first stop was a three-day trek at maximum safe warp to Starbase 62.  That was the same starbase Jim had spent three and a half standard Earth months, immediately after Tarsus.  
   
Jim takes a deep breath and stares at the tiny, bright letters on the screen.  The obvious sinks in.  
   
Pike had told Jim about Tango sometime in the five days between Tarsus and 62, not on some random Hangover Sunday at the Academy.  The book Pike left him is familiar, because Jim had heard its words when he was thirteen and nearly dead.   And the dream he’s been having isn’t some subconscious projection of some errant delusion: it’s a _memory_.    
   
Pike had been _there_.   
   
 _Take care of yourself, Jim._  
   
Jim’s eyes sting with tears.  He blinks them back and tightly closes his eyes.  Jim doesn’t know why it means so much, or why it seems to brighten something inside of him, but it does.  It changes something that he can’t pinpoint, that makes him feel—  
   
“You okay, Jim?  How do you feel?”  
   
Jim opens his eyes to see Bones reaching for the medical kit, the one with the ever-present tricorder.  Jim puts his hand on Bones’ wrist and stops him with a shake of his head.  
   
“Good,” Jim says.  “And young.  I feel young.”  
   
And, god, does he.  
   
\--end


End file.
